Danielson Return With New EP 'Snap Outtavit'
Quirky American rock group Danielson are releasing their new EP 'Snap Outtavit' on September 28th. The EP features Daniel Smith making music with his family, sisters Megan (bells, vox) and Rachel (keys, vox) , and brothers Andrew and David (drums), with his wife Elin (vox), not to mention a bunch of kids of the various Smiths (vox). Likewise, the album is recorded with early champion Kramer, who helped mix and also played bass and keys on a couple of tracks.
As with the early Danielson records, the verses here are often chromatic, and the rhythms are often exceedingly slippery, and there are modulations. If you didn’t know better, you might even say the Danielson songs are a bit progressive, with canny and exceedingly sophisticated arrangements, but just when they appear to be musically demanding (though entirely in reach for a Smith family ensemble that has come to be able to play anything), the songs give way to big beautiful hooks (often in the choruses), repetitions that are often sung by massive ensembles of Smiths, sometimes in counterpoint, antiphons of Smiths, and with the ecstatic and prophetic quality that such hooks should entail, even as Smith’s lyrics have become more allusive and less patently gospel-oriented, with the result that they are even more powerful, emblematic, and persuasive.
The Famile has come from all over now, from across New Jersey, and from deepest Pennsylvania, to unite in this purpose again, and the lyrics reflect this - the lyrics are the evocation of this - both of the solitary path, the pilgrim’s progress that Daniel Smith is on, to the beauty, power, and whimsical grace of his family playing with him. On the luminous “On Purpose,” for example, has minimalist inclinations (in the prologue, where a very simple organ chord plays, while the singers intone “What do you know?” for a solid minute and a half), after which some verses give way to an out-chorus, an arresting and earwormable melody, “It’s getting hot in here, but you are so patient, dear,” lasting for more than two minutes. “On Purpose” is like no pop song you’ve heard recently, with the groove being held down primarily by the marimba, and it could take you several dozen listens to figure which is the gospel message concealed in the repeated line: “It’s all on purpose now.”
An allegory, this recording? Like in ecstatic religious poetry of another time, the new Danielson songs, on this EP, tackle the spiritual struggles of the everyday - growing older, having kids, momentarily losing hope, for which the route to salvation is music itself, the playing, the singing, the writing of music, and the listening to it as well. Daniel Smith invites you and yours onto the sojourn with him.
