It’s not often that I find myself bamboozled by an artist or an album. But E.D. Sedgewick’s latest offering, ‘We Wear White’ isn’t the kind of album you come across every day.
‘Eclectic’ would be a reasonable starting point in the quest for adjectives, launching as it does into the garage punk of ‘Dirty’ that’s raw and edgy. It’s quite a contrast to ‘The Hex of Sex (For Minimal man)’, which immediately follows on and brings elements of post-punk and funk into the mix – simultaneously. The title track starts like a gentle 50s-influenced end-of-prom strum, but ends up going all eerie and odd. And that’s just the problem: every song is different, and half the songs end up nothing like the songs they start out as.
I suppose you’d call ‘We Wear White’ a ‘rock’ album. There are certainly plenty of ‘rock’ moments – take the cranked up guitar-driven old-school r’n’b stylings of ‘He’s the One’ that manages to whip in elements of grunge, psychedelia and lamecore rap with some soul backing vocals chucked in for good measure. I mean, other than an omelette, what do you make of that?
There are are some songs – ‘DNA’ and ‘Rockin’ the Boat’ for example – that draw on reggae, ska and world music and could be good if they weren’t so damn messy – by which I mean Sedgwick’s rappy vocals don’t sit comfortably with the music. Such incongruity can work in the hands of, say, Castrovalva, but Sedgwick just doesn’t always pull it off all that well.
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Still, that isn’t to say ‘We Wear White’ is a bad album, because it isn’t. It’s an album that’s brimming with ideas and constantly confounds any expectations you may have. Closer ‘Weatherman’ is perhaps the best track, and comes as something of a relief as Sedgwick rails against, well, everything, from the 60s to the 90s, spitting lyrics at fifteen to the dozen and attacks ‘fucking shitty techno’ (and every other kind of music for that matter) which ‘sounds like shit to me’... for which, it gets my vote.
E.D. Sedgwick Online
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