(Self-released, digital)
Dave Kleh is “takin’ off the shades,” as he proclaims on his new album, 20th Century Exile. The latest entry into the Vermont songwriter’s eclectic oeuvre, it is at once a nostalgic dedication to simpler times and an eye roll at the present and future. While the mashup of styles produces a somewhat jarring effect, it is always interesting.
The album opens with “Why Do We Pray to the Gods Who We Pray to,” a mix of ’70s blues-rock noodling, slowed-down ’80s new wave, modern-sounding synths and psychedelic interludes. After a short intro, Kleh ponders faith and motivation in a wandering monotone. Later, the title track offers the most distilled example of this lyrical style. There he riffs on everything from decades-old news to his current TV habits to Taylor Swift, all through overlapping streams of consciousness.
The second track, “Sensibly Challenged Persons,” follows a similar formula to the first, albeit with a chip-tune intro and trap-sounding high hats throughout. The song closes with a quick monologue about the political usefulness of pandemics before “There’s a Revolution” starts up with a musical nod to Jimi Hendrix. But that’s merely the chorus — the much longer verses return to a breathless spoken word.
Approaching the album’s midpoint, Kleh pumps the brakes on the weird with the tamer “I Miss the Old Days.” The soothing ode to nostalgia teases the thematic through line that connects the album’s disparate styles. It’s also where the record starts to find sonic cohesion: The now-sung vocals sit more comfortably, and the stylistic tensions within the songs ease with a slowdown and a slight R&B influence.
Similarly, “I Love My Green Mountain State” breaks up the eclecticism in the album’s back half with a departure from Kleh’s bluesy new-wave tack — he veers into the folkier end of 20th-century music. Yet even these two more traditional-sounding songs keep each other at arm’s length.
Kleh’s attempt to condense three or four decades of American music into a 10-track collage of styles held together with Mod Podge is admirable, artistically. But it can leave the listener dizzy as influences emerge and dissipate at light speed.
The album’s real charm is in the desperate sincerity with which Kleh sings (or, more often, chants) his way through the experience of living several decades past a world that makes sense. He muses through scientific and cultural changes and, by album closer “Legend in My Own Mind,” finishes with an ambivalence between wishing to do it all again and just settling for living on one’s own terms.
Ironically, for a record that decries the chaos of contemporary society, it heavily gestures toward the beauty of an eternally recycled postmodernism. While Kleh’s words want for a return to the past, his collage of sound suggests a present that has room for the new and the reused alike — a place for both mavericks and old-heads to keep on truckin’.
20th Century Exile is available at davekleh.bandcamp.com and on all major streaming platforms.
This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2024.
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