Mojave 3: Ask Me Tomorrow
I used to think that Mojave 3 was Neil Halstead's post-Slowdive break-up document. Turns out it was and it wasn't.
I was listening to Ask Me Tomorrow yesterday and was struck by how much the songs themselves reminded me of Slowdive's first two albums - the more singable and lyrical ones. "Alison" and "40 Days" from Souvlaki always struck me as pop songs clothed in shimmer, and "Mercy" from Ask Me Tomorrow has a similar extended drama as "Primal" which closes out Just for a Day.
This morning I read the liner notes in the Rough Trade reissue which was an engaging origin story that filled in some blanks and gently disabused some previously held notions about that album. I'd known that Slowdive lost their contract with Creation Records after Pygmalion, a starkly beautiful work of disembodied sounds that had much more to do with Seefeel's Warp Records releases than Britpop.
It turns out that Neil Halstead was writing a sibling album while creating Pygmalion as an exercise in contrasts after being inspired by a roster of singer-songwriters and folk musicians previously off his radar. While Halstead characterizes Slowdive's third album as "cold," I can see that seeing a record come together on a computer instead of through a whole band in one room is a jarringly different experience. And being introduced to the works of Leonard Cohen in the midst of that process must have been an epiphany.
The songs from that parallel track were recorded in a fairly spontaneous, one day session in a demo studio, a few cassettes then circulating under the Slowdive name. I read Facing the Other Way, Martin Aston's extensive 4AD Records book but totally forgot about how (then) label owner Ivo Watts-Russell was cagey about listening to a demo from a recently-dumped Creation act. He changed his mind once heard the tape, of course, releasing those six songs plus three more recorded at Blackwing Studios as Mojave 3's debut.
Post-shoegaze? Country dreampop? Ask Me Tomorrow feels to me less sleepy in that cozy, dreamy sense, but cold and exhausted. The recurring motifs of deceit, tears, longing, playing the fool, plus a trio of names (Sarah, Cathy, Mercy) - the vocabulary of Ask Me Tomorrow - all wrapped in this gauze of reverb. It's a delicate record, almost gingerly tender, protecting the hurts and wounds with a blanket of intimate atmosphere.
The EMI demo studio story explains that gentle haze. The mic bleed. The spontaneous convergence. Halstead immediately heard Cowboy Junkies in it - a group whose earliest records derived their atmosphere from musicians sharing a room, captured largely through a single stereo microphone rather than assembled through overdubs. Loz Colbert from Ride showing Ian McCutcheon drum fills at Blackwing - also makes sense, for those triplets stood out to me on the first listen 30 years ago.
It’s easy to over-read the record through the circumstances of Slowdive being dropped by Creation and mauled by the press. Yet the liner notes describe a session marked less by devastation than by relief, spontaneity, and Ian’s excitement at playing the songs Neil had written. Neil went traveling afterwards; Rachel passed the tape along; nobody seems to have entered the room expecting to make an album. That gives more credit to Halstead’s songwriting as the work of a role-playing storyteller rather than the transcript of a confession. It is easy to conflate sincerity with truth, and singer-songwriters - along with the mythology built around them - often encourage us to do exactly that.
With the recent Mojave 3 reissues, I'd finally gotten around to examining the other four albums from the group. They sound confident and assertive, compared to the guardedness of Ask Me Tomorrow, and they're also unmistakably from the same people. They almost make the debut feel like an aesthetic outlier, which is not an unfair characterization when comparing sun-kissed blooms with a seed still huddled in cold soil.