The way I see it the title of Sly & The Family Drone’s new record, With Love, is both how they’re offering it to you and also something like their basic operating principle. Although they’ve dressed it up pretty in pink and even some satin and lace, this isn’t a set of syrupy romantic ballads or smooth noise jams. Fun as it would be to see the Family Drone, clad all in white, stand up from their stools for the key change, swaying in harmony as Matt Cargill really lays on the heartbroken testifying, that dream will just have to wait.
Music needs to be made with love. It connects people. You’ll have noticed lately that the uneasy commerce or art binary has tipped over towards the ugly idea of ‘content’. Weightless cultural slop consisting entirely of surface, generated by machine committee. No blood or dirt in it. No human hurt or joy. No love. On the cover the pink letters of the title hover over something spilled on a scuffed and worn surface. You need the mess to go with the love. Sly & The Family Drone are bringing all of that.
A visceral live experience, Sly have always been an antidote to airless cultural sterility, a Dionysiac, in-the-moment event. But the thrilling sensory overwhelm of live action is one thing, making interesting records out of free improv noise-jazz is another. Over the years these two aspects of the Family’s personality have found ways to get along. With Love once again refines their sound, pushing out towards something more atmospheric and spacious while holding to a stronger sense of intuitive structure. Opener ‘Psychic Surgery’ has rolling unsettled drums and sax gradually being submerged by the electronics which, to me, seem better recorded than on any of their previous albums, clearer, more dynamic.
Static crackle comes and goes pulling in sounds from strange frequencies like Holger Czukay turning the long wave dial. The hum and hiss flare up on the third track and there’s no drums, just James Allsopp softly playing ‘Over The Rainbow’. It’s quite lovely, very possibly a slightly throwaway aside but suggests future paths or side project digressions. Last time out they made an award winning film to accompany ‘Glistening Benevolence’, one day someone will have the guts to get them in to do a full soundtrack but it’s odd to imagine them actually doing a set of classic love songs or standards.
‘The Guts of Albion’ is like the distilled essence of what they do, compact and instinctive, especially when the drums kick off in the last couple of minutes. ‘Snagged on Frowns’ is a bleary dreamer but the whole of the second half is more open and exploratory in mood. If once upon a time Sly were all Crash Worship mania they now seem to be wandering out into territory 23 Skidoo abandoned when they got into bass lines and dub. A jazz adjacent interzone, mixing scraps of industrial and international sounds. There’s a wide open space for them to discover, but you know they’ll approach it with love.
