I have held off on posting about this record for a while–mostly because it has a kickstarter campaign being run by the artist themselves to get what, push to shove, is my favorite album of the 1990’s re-released in deluxe fashion. I know I’m enough of a fan that I have no objectivity here, so I didn’t want to come off as a being a shill passing a hat. Thankfully, this particular Kickstarter project eclipsed its goal within two weeks. Instead, I’ll post so folks are aware of the existence of a magical, wonderful, unknown record from 1997 that should be in any music collection that also has Guided By Voices, The Beatles, REM, The Kinks, Oasis, Spoon, The Grifters, Blur, etc. etc.
Kontiki, the 1997 record from Austin band Cotton Mather can sit next to anything by any of those other artists and stand just as tall.
Cotton Mather were a 3 (and sometimes 4) piece band from Austin who kind of got lost in the shuffle in the early 1990’s. Fronted by a fellow named Robert Harrison, their first album (Cotton Is King) is a bit overly-slick, bears a definite Squeeze influence, and was somewhat out-of-step with the louder, rawer sounds of 1993-95. Harrison thought so too; he talks of that first record as having been something of a mistake, describing touring on it to be a “chore” due to the fact that he really fell out with most of his own songs on the record. Harrison had started hearing Pavement and Guided By Voices by that time, and was enthralled.
What you should know here about Robert Harrison is that despite his Texas upbringing, his voice sounds like a ringer for John Lennon. What also seems important is that his main creative counterpart in Cotton Mather, bassist Whit Williams, can do a pretty solid Macca impersonation–at least on backing vocals. What you should also know is that Harrison and Williams had a way with a melodic hook that was simply undeniable. Those are some pretty awesome building blocks but on their first record, which was clearly a stab at attracting a big label and appealing to a mainstream, it just didn’t click.
Cotton Mather re-tooled. Harrison came up with crates and crates of demo material for dozens of songs. He and Williams pared everything down to the 14 songs that would end up on Kontiki…but at that point there was no money for recording anything properly. With drummer Dana Mizer, Harrsion and Williams ended up recording most of Kontiki in the garage of Harrison’s house in a residential neighborhood in Austin…on cassette tape (yep) and 4-track ADAT (Yikes!). If you’re unfamiliar with recording gear, in the age of Pro-Tools and digital studios, this was the equivalent of recording into a can with some string and having Thomas Edison grinding out a wax cylinder with the final results. Somehow, through diligence and not a little bit of trial-and-error, Cotton Mather ended up with some decent base tracks.
The next part of the story of this album is a guy in Nashville named Brad Jones. Jones is one HELL of a great producer who happens to do more rock and guitar pop stuff in a country music city than is healthy, but his credits include Josh Rouse, Rad Foster & Bill Lloyd, Jill Sobule, Matthew Sweet, as well as being a go-to session guy on bass especially for Elvis Costello and Steve Earle. Jones had let it be known that he was intrigued with Mather’s first album, and so the band shipped off their garage-recorded junkshop songs to him. Jones did some kind of miracle of production, somehow making the mix work, adding a few instruments at Harrison and Williams’ bidding, and then skull sessioning with the guys to leave in all sorts of found sounds present in the original tapes to make this a fascinating-sounding record (you’ll hear click tracks, chairs squeak, conversations, scrapped song snippets splattered all over Kontiki).
The album finished, the band put it out on tiny a tiny Austin label called Copper Records. Copper printed as many copies as they and the band could afford. They went out to a few distributors. They sent as many as they could to radio and retail in college towns.
Nothing happened.
I happened to be on a listserv at the time where a few critics who’d gotten copies couldn’t stop raving about Kontiki. I was working at a record store at the time, so we brought in two copies, one of which I bought, the other of which I sold in twenty minutes to a co-worker before we ever opened the store, based on me playing my copy. For the next three months we sold every copy of Kontiki we could get. As soon as we’d get one (the distributor had trouble getting any in, due to a very limited CD pressing), we’d play my copy in-store, and sell our retail copies within minutes. Never ever have I seen anything like it. We used to call it the “Who hell is this???” record, because that question would happen within about two songs of playing Kontiki at the store. Sadly, though, that was that in the States for Kontiki.
Over in the UK, things went differently. At a party, Noel Gallagher of Oasis happened to hear Kontiki and fell head over heels for it. He started talking it up as the best record of the year to the British music press, as well as on TV and radio. Kontiki got picked up for UK release by then-fledgling indie label Rainbow Quartz and sold a bunch of copies in England, where Cotton Mather toured to great success and where their song “My Before And After” got them glowing, almost slobbering praise from not only NME and MOJO, but also from The Guardian and the Times. The Brits were unafraid to call Kontiki what it was: the best Beatles album the Fab Four never made. Sound absurd? Probably is. But I can defend that position. Imagine you had a time machine, and could take the full-of-energy 1967 Beatles through the next three decades of rock and pop music, absorbing everything–punk, postpunk, prog-rock, grunge, new wave, and even lo-fi indie rock. Now imagine that you plunk them down and see what sort of album they’d make having taken in those influences. I would maintain (and am willing to take the heat on this) that if those things were possible, Kontiki would be the record The Beatles would indeed have made.
It is incredibly accessible, but incredibly dense and layered. Kontiki is noisy and shambolic. It is challenging in ways that pop music too frequently is not. It wanders off the reservation time and again. It takes risks with style and structure and breaks rules in a bravado display of craftsman-like chutzpah. It is more than just interesting sounds, too; Harrison and Williams know their way around a lyric: “Is this some sort of reverie for the one woman Jan and Dean heading for the crash?” is typical of the elliptical, witty, and sometimes chill-inducing words that Cotton Mather sings on their wonderful songs here. (The only chance that I’m guessing anyone has heard a song from Kontiki is that the TV show Veronica Mars used the aptly-titled and gorgeous “Lily Dreams On” in the season 1 finale.)
Kontiki did well in the UK, but went out of print anyway about 10 years ago. (In the US, all copies were sold through by the end of 1998 or so.) Since then, copies of the CD in mint condition have skyrocketed as the legend of Cotton Mather has grown in critical circles; last year the average price on the four copies that sold on Ebay was over $100.
Harrison, who now records fronting a new band called Future Clouds And Radar, also owns the rights to Kontiki, and decided he really wanted to see the record get the widespread release he’d always hoped it would get back in 1997. He set up a Kickstarter.com campaign to accomplish this, a deluxe reissue of Kontiki, featuring the original album and a bonus disc with some of the best outtakes from that time (Harrison describes these as “surprisingly good”, and I’ll trust his ear on this); there’ll also be liner notes about the songs and recording of the record.
So. If you still want in on some of the kickstarter goodies, click me.
Here’s the very droll and rather humble video Harrison made for the funding campaign. (Believe me when I say that Robert Harrison is about as nice a guy as you’ll find making incredibly artistic music.)
And you say you need some samples of this wonderful album to hear the hype?
Okay.