If you've been inside a church that plays "contemporary" worship music in the last 10 years, it's possible you're familiar with a composition of Daniel Smith. Don't let him fool you. Smith's primary musical vehicle, begun as a senior thesis in college, is known as Danielson, and with a loose association of blood relation and otherwise called the Famile he has built some of the most curious and bizarre experimental indie rock since his beginnings in 1995.
His latest record is "Ships," which, besides being a Famile reunion, is a whole-hog party for quirk-rock nerds, with Smith enlisting the contribution of Deerhof, Why?, Serena Maneesh, Half-Handed Cloud and some guy named Stevens you've probably never heard of. It's beyond my powers to describe exactly what's happening on this record (you can hear a couple of songs on Danielson's myspace, including the standout "Cast It At the Setting Sail") so I'll defer to the professional press (and there's been quite a lot of it).
Dusted:
Smith’s voice remains his most recognizable calling card. It’s almost
infinitely malleable, bending and straining but never breaking, always
scraping above and beyond where the top of his range should be. It’s
almost impossible to imagine the person from whom such a voice would
emerge. I can only envision some kind of mask, frozen with a look of
(only somewhat creepy) glee. He’s not always happy, but even in the
minor-key moments, there’s a sense of hope in the background. And
that’s where religion comes into the picture.
PopMatters:
It’s awfully tough to categorize Smith’s songs, which make for
adventurous sailing over rough seas. One minute you’re amazed by the
innocent beauty of it all and the next you’re almost certain somebody
sneakily recorded the church toddlers singing over random instrumental
music, then called it Danielson. Think of this latter description as
aural seasickness. Although it often seems like one big lark, Danielson
is no joke. Smith is featured at length in interview segments during
the excellent “Why Should The Devil Have All The Good Music?”
documentary, and he comes off as a thoughtful, intelligent, and quite
serious young man. So why does he seem to revert to childhood whenever
he sings? That’s for him – or his psychologist—to know, and us to
figure out if we can.
And Pitchfork, which gave the record a 9.1 rating
In his decade-long run as the ringleader of art-rock collective the
Danielson Famile, Daniel Smith has practically defined the term "cult
artist." His records-- most of them highly conceptual paeans to God-- can
be exhausting, barraging listeners with surprise twists and turns and tangled
song fragments. Smith himself has an inimitable vocal style: a twisted melange of
bleating, twinging yelps, whoops, and screeches. Yet Smith's discography has yielded him a small but unflaggingly loyal
congregation, drawn to music that, above all else, is uninhibitedly
gleeful, celebratory, and rallying-- the kind of inspired communal rejoicing
that's highly contagious.
I was first aware of Danielson from his first series of releases on Tooth and Nail Records, which were largely underappreciated and often derided by the Christian indie rock world he was being sold to, and, suffice to say, nothing from the art-deaf Christian music world as a whole. So it was a surprise to me to see them turn up as indie darlings for Bloomington's Secretly Canadian, where they've been since 2001. It's an acquired taste, for sure, but those can be the most fun to tackle.
