Glen Johnson - Details Not Recorded

1. Brilliant Ships
2. My Horror Mask
3. Late Caller
4. Details Not Recorded
5. Les Catacombes
6. I Know You My Name
7. Pause In The Night, A
8. Save Me
9. Desiderata
10. Loves Like You
11. Quiet Life

Given that Glen Johnson has been the only constant member and primary songwriter of the forever-revolving Piano Magic since 1996, as well as the brains behind electronica offshoots Textile Ranch and Future Conditional, it seems a little strange that he belatedly felt the need to release a solo-monikered ‘debut’ in the shape of Details Not Recorded. In an email to this writer, Johnson suggested that the unmasked nom de plume isn’t a delayed bout of egotism but more an impatient/logistical move with largely unintended extra by-products; “I’m probably too prolific for my own good. The songs on the solo album were written and recorded when Piano Magic was on hiatus. Some of them most likely could’ve been on a Piano Magic record but I was just too impatient to wait for us to get going again as a band. Even so, in some ways, I think I’ve kicked open a few new doors…” Indeed, although the lyrical content remains reliably built on the brand of bleak romanticism that Morrissey long ago switched for butch bravado, aesthetically Details Not Recorded adds several different outfits to Johnson’s wardrobe and re-tailors others.
So there’s much less of the ‘band-sound’ that has permeated many of Piano Magic’s latter-day wares with rippling Durutti Column guitars and prowling Joy Division low-end rhythm sections. Instead, Johnson has rewound from such late-70s/early-80s influences; to the mid-70s analogue-synth ambience of Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity and Trans-Europe Express LPs (for the likes of “Brilliant Ships” and “I Know You Know My Name”), into the late-1960s/early-70s realms of Leonard Cohen’s Songs From A Room and Songs of Love And Hate (”My Horror Mask” and “A Pause In The Night”) and way back to quasi-medieval folk baroque (”Desiderata”). Consequently, there’s an electro-acoustic intimacy that further extends Johnson’s already autographical literary prose into captivating and occasionally chilling extremes. The core songs are even more terrifically-twisted paeans of bittersweet obsession (”My hands are small but careful/I’d trace your map of bone/Slowly chart the latitudes/As sculptors sculpt the stone”), searing self-deprecation (”My voice is but a sigh/My words are but an act/The one who leads the way/Is leading from the back”), lacerating loathing (”I don’t like when you cry on the pillow/I don’t like what I see in your eyes”) and self-imposed solitude (”Oh, won’t you keep it down?/I want a quiet life/I’m tired of the sound/I’m tired of the light”).
Overall, the distance from Piano Magic’s idioms, although strikingly impressive, isn’t too disconcertingly vast. Which is a reassuringly good thing of course, given that there remains supportive space for both familiar collaborators (Angèle David-Guillou of Klima, David Sheppard from State River Widening/Phelan Sheppard and Piano Magic percussionist Jerome Tcherneyan) and new ones (Willard Grant Conspiracy’s Josh Hillman and Keiron Phelan, also from State River Widening et al.). Furthermore, Johnson’s Bernard Sumner-like tones continue to sustain a deliciously deadpan presence throughout. Followers of past Piano Magic spell-casting should be pleased with this diagonal step out from the discography, whilst the previously unhypnotised may find a new route into an infatuation with a continuously impressive songwriter still content to skulk around in his own mercurial shadow...www.adequacy.net