Album Review: Peter Jefferies Closed Circuit

Grapefruit vinyl GY 13.4

It's hard to make a really good album, but I think this is one. I never heard it when it was first released in 2001, but I am now a lucky owner of this re-release. 

A vinyl album is often the vehicle for two separate visions and here quite plainly there is that distinction. The riff and drive of side one (with Gutteridge and Cale jostling for mentorship) is followed by the beauty and triumph of side two where the typical Jefferies’ piano arpeggios that we know and love begin to gain some ascendence. 

To make a complete album requires concentration, focus, clarity of purpose and attention to detail. Listen to the narrative link between the opening, acapella track, “Time and The Singular Man”,  and “Ghostwriter” with its glorious instrumental introduction that closes the album. Both songs describe observations that may even be self-referential. Indeed, here is a song-writer unashamed of narrative presented in a fresh, unclichéd way in the perfect tenderness of “Coming Home With You” which opens side two with its harmonious, ringing guitar chords. And on the same song, we hear Jefferies’ unusual attention to detail with drums that eventually establish a surprisingly intricate pattern for a 1/2 time love song: 

Jefferies has always traded on some degree of pathos in his work and this album is no exception, yet the pathos here seems weighted in favour of triumph, hope and quiet determination. This album does not have the brutal smack of angry youth perhaps, yet there is still some of the punk of Nocturnal Projections on “Talkin’ Bout Nuthin.’” Pain and anger are certainly still present but seem more content to smoulder under melodic surfaces as in “Closed Circuit”  and “Whatever You Want” where Jefferies would: 

....love to sit next to you 

Tell you all about what I am gonna do

Perhaps old resentments have even dissolved into resignation and acknowledgment as in the beauty and sadness of “State of The Nation” which is lifted by the synth strings of Anita Anker into the realm of a true classic for me.  

Where are you now

The person I knew 

not so long ago

are you still here?

With your perspicacious, inbuilt

tenacious, awkward opinions on show

Are you still here? 

Unexpectedness and abruptness are everywhere on this album too: in the unique chord changes and bass movements; in observations that end suddenly as in “King in The Clown’s New Clothes”, where it as if Syd (Barrett)?) is smiling down, yet suddenly gone; and in the very structure and flow of the two album sides themselves – the desolation of “State Of The Nation” followed immediately by  “Won’t Be Long” where it seems Brian Wilson himself is being channelled. Side one ends with “Driest Month In 100 Years” which begins in a driving 4/4 with Jefferies sneering:

The light is a perfect smear

The tide rolls up and walks 

The driest month in a hundred years

Time on my hands

every night

Through some intelligent chord changes the song moves into a discordant and more rhythmically angular B section where: 

The name on the bell is Martha Spell

that’s all you need to know

She once was a chemist 

but now she’s a feminist

managing her own bordello

And then the C section appears almost like an old friend, Jefferies now using his characteristic doubled vocals and piano arpeggios. He sings:

So where will you go

before you’re made to measure

finally being joined prominently by Anita Anker on additional vocals as they both ponder:

Wouldn’t you think so

living on the side of sea level?

Back in the Brickyard

what do we see

a crack in the surface

Cutting no corners, making no haste

It is almost like the C section of side one's final song is pre-empting the change to the more melodic, triumphant nature of side two. Everything has its place on this record.

If this album is not great then I don’t know what greatness is. A great album takes the resources that it has at its disposal: words, narrative, vocals, personnel, instruments, arrangements, song order, and then it moulds and organises the relationships and flows between songs. It builds to create an aesthetic that is united and somehow bigger than the sum of all its parts.  A great album is lean and trimmed of weaker songs or songs with un-important details that don’t contribute to the greater whole.  This is such an album I believe.