If Josh Weller's life were a musical - and he gives every indication of believing that it is - it'd be one hell of a topsy-turvy show. The script would be by Woody Allen, with direction from Tim Burton.
Josh Weller
It would have Chet Baker singing duets with Tom Waits under a wonky spotlight and Fred Astaire skipping around on the walls and ceiling. And at the centre of this upside-down cabaret? The young gentleman with the bow tie and the precipitous hair giving no quarter with his guitar? Yes, that's Mr Weller, and tonight he'll be performing something rather special from his own songbook…
This brilliant new four-track EP, PUSH, is a succinct introduction to Josh Weller's utterly unique musical habitat. It abounds with exuberant narratives, witty one-liners and the gay stomp of old show tunes, all fed through a modern pop sensibility.
Josh, whose fortunes have taken him from the island of Borneo to the wilds of east London, is as adept at locating the outlandish in the everyday as he is at coaxing humour out of heartbreak. He can't abide “songs written so that they relate to everyone, like horoscopes” - instead, he delights in the particular, the idiosyncratic. His wryly observational song writing casts an eye on the behaviour of strangers, acquaintances, and ex-girlfriends, without overlooking his own finely tuned neuroses.
The title track, Push, moves at the pace of a ballroom jive and heaves like a pirate ship, deals with heartbreak in a highly adventurous fashion, revisiting the exotic seas of Josh's childhood along the way. Closer to home, She Can't Quit Smoking gives even the posh London it-girl a merciless skewering, but Josh infuses it with a jovial, dance-inducing bounce so irresistible, even said it-girl couldn't help but shuffle her feet. The fairground wurlitzer is there in it’s twirling, swirling, technicolour glory on the vaudevillian shanty that is track 3 on the e.p. Monster.
Bringing this particular episode to a close is Tough Luck in Love. Reaching far back into his past and deep down into that vertiginous hair, Josh Weller finds his romany roots. This ultimate song on the cd is a eastern european sounding, gypsy curse of a ditty where Weller bemoans that, “Falling in love is rough, when youre not tough”. Indeed.
A multi-instrumentalist, Josh played many of the parts here himself. The EP was produced by Ryan Hadlock (The Gossip, Soko, Johnny Flynn) and Iain Harvie (The Maccabees). PUSH is merely the opening number onto a hugely promising career - Josh has another EP to come later this year and an album due in 2010 - but what an opening number, and what a show this is going to be.