Album Review: Sheep, Dog & Wolf – Two Minds (Aphrodite)

Sheep, Dog & Wolf is the artistic name adopted by Daniel McBride, whose Two Minds ends  a seven year hiatus. These songs are in equal part chants and poems set to complex and deliciously repetitive rhythms. The eight-track song cycle is exquisite and, as a collection, feel like invitations into expansive meditative and emotional landscapes.

The remarkable thing about Sheep, Dog & Wolf is not just the gorgeous songs but knowing that McBride has created and played all the music on his own. That he is sole author of everything from composition through instrumentation and production in his 20s has echoes of Todd Rundgren’s 1971 classic and career-launching Something/Anything, also created entirely on his own at a similar age.

By way of background check, Daniel McBride has respected track record. At 17, he released his Ablutophobia EP which found its way overseas gaining praise. Then 2013’s Egospect was a finalist for the Taite Prize for Best New Zealand Album. McBride reports that he is a classically trained saxophonist, trained composition at VUW in Wellington, and a self-taught player of a variety of other instruments including drums, guitar, cello and euphonium. ‘

‘Colour’, ‘energy’, ‘joyous’ and ‘free’ are a set of words McBride uses to describe this album. They are aptly evocative of these songs. Confronted by novelty, perhaps it is human nature to reach for points of comparison. Whether landscapes or, in this case, music, when we are set adrift from known grooves and tracks we search for reference points. In this sonic landscape, others have compared Sheep, Dog & Wolf to Sufjan Stevens. I find myself also reminded of recordings from the Windham Hill label and, on occasions, the soaring falsettos of Jon Anderson-era Yes.

McBride’s song titles are succinct: the delicate Periphescene sent me to Google where I found it to allude to “the first fever of human-pair bonding”. Fine and the closing Feeling take us on journeys of melded instrumentation and voice in which the repetition also reminds me of Philip Glass. Glass, however, was no lyricist and certainly never composed around themes as palpable as the smell of a beloved’s hair. At other times, the deliberate and yearning vocals remind me of Zach Condon and the soaring songs of Beruit.

But perhaps the challenge in this collection is to suspend all such comparisons and embrace Sheep, Dog & Wolf for what Two Minds is: a narrative song cycle that paradoxically takes one places while paradoxically offered by an artist whose songs arose entirely from single place.

This is music that defies easy categories. Its perhaps best to suspend them and enjoy the journey.

Robin Kearns

 

 

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