High Dive

Maria McKee’s had so many rave reviews over the last decade that she’ll never want for toilet roll, but don’t let that put you off. High Dive, her first album in seven years, is an early contender for record of the year.

Notwithstanding ‘Show Me Heaven’ (whose residuals alone probably funded this record), the singer’s financial and critical stock have never been in balance. American audiences are notoriously shy of shape-changers and salamanders, while the UK often seemed puzzled by the details in a resume that encompasses everything from west coast hardcore, turn-of-the-century burlesque, art rock, glam rock, cowpunk and bare-all ballads.

Having left Ireland over a decade ago, effectively severing strategic alliances forged with Irish acts like The Black Velvet Band, The Golden Horde and Gavin Friday, McKee missed out on Hibernian asylum with the post-Jeff Buckley generation. As a final insult, the Broadway scale of this album appears to have disqualified her from coverage in the alt-country magazines, a genre she pioneered with Lone Justice.

Such is the curse of the trailblazer. McKee’s frame of reference is a 180-degree Sergio Leone pan, and like she says in the opening tune: “We belong to the open spaces”. High Dive is her magnum opus, her most audacious work, and a vertiginous leap of faith into thin air. Less a concept album than a full-blown rock opera, it takes its cue from the loony tunesters and the wiggy visionaries: Brian Wilson, Bowie, Lou’s Berlin stories, or The Who circa Tommy (particularly the hyperactive Carmine Appice/Keith Moon fills and Townsend windmills of the awesome ‘My Friend Foe’ and ‘Non Religious Building’). Imagine John Cale locked in mortal combat over studio budgets with a tag team of Bob Ezrin and Phil Spector. You don’t need to know that every string and horn part, drum fill and stacked harmony was recorded in her own home studio set-up to appreciate the weight of this thing, but it does make you appreciate her Fitzcarraldo-like ambition.

Every vocal vamp, every overdub is brilliantly realised and utterly integral to the whole. As song cycles go, it’s up there with Pulp’s Different Class or The Flaming Lips The Soft Bulletin – a 55-minute love letter to tempus fugitive, innocence and loss, Walter Hill’s Streets Of Fire fantasia with better dialogue, viewed from the premature autumn of thirty-something ennui.

With this, McKee once again proves herself a superlative songwriter (the pocket symphonies ‘Life Is Sweet’ and ‘From Our TV Teens To The Tomb’), a resourceful arranger (the glam tragedies and free jazz of ‘Be My Joy’), and a daredevil singer capable of playing the Acid Queen, the cheerleader and the class freak – the Jennifer Jason Leigh of rock ‘n’ roll. Most of all, she never settles for a melody that won’t break your heart and stitch it back together again.

Friends, this is a grand madness.