Think Like A Key 2026
There’s Still Time…
To celebrate a future that’s forever in the past, one veteran purveyor of psychedelia presses his poetry on the face of eternity.
Where is an artist supposed to go in his sunset years once the stock of the preceding half-century has been taken and the future seems to require everybody to tone down erstwhile quirkiness and assess mortality instead? Alan Clayson doesn’t know any direction other than forward – and still, the Kentish musician always looks back, if only to make sure there’s no repetition of previous eccentricities on his next endeavor. This may be why all things transient weigh heavily over “There’s Still Time…” and allow Alan to proceed to the place in which “the past is past mattering” – the place to which the shortest piece on display will welcome the sonic spectator in the middle of the album.
Not for nothing the mind-warping opener “Behind The Sun” offers, again and again, “Let’s change the subject” – as though Clayson’s cryptic lines, delivered in a declamatory manner over the almost discordant piano, plonking vibes and parping organ, let the audience linger on their meaning that’s clear anyway. There’s no other way to exorcise sadness caused by the ticking of the clock hidden in the stanzas of the playfully groovy “Clicketty-Clack” – whose Jesus-referencing, riff-driven refrains are, for whatever reason, concealed from the printed lyrics – and presented in full view on the platter’s cover. Strange as it can feel, the listener should fall in love with “The Legion Of the Lost” and follow the tempo shifts of this medieval dance first into the cabaret delirium of “Underpass” to indulge in the faux-orchestral, finely electrified decadence, and then enter the choral grandeur of “Martian Afternoon (Hymn For A Lost Planet)” and enjoy the singer’s sardonic cynicism.
In contrast to the solemnity, the alluringly pompous – in terms of both the sound of the ivories and the lyrical content – mini-epic “Jack Cade” unexpectedly introduces blues harmonica to the record’s palette; the wobbly, mirage-like “KX54 WVL” leads the Clayson flock to a cosmic fairground; and the operettesque “Something Happened” unfolds, in under two minutes, a drama of a gloomy stripe. Not surprising, then, that “Nemesis (The With-It Vicar)” reaches for the court liturgy of the Dark Ages before “Craig And Rachel” finds Alan resort to spoken word to stage a cinéma vérité story set against the patinated, metallic-organ backdrop, and “Grandmother’s Wedding Day” switches to a Prokofiev sort of disco. But while “There Were Moments When…” swings nostalgia towards the Chamberlain era of radio schmaltz, arrangement- and mood-wise, the artsy “Dust Devils” is as bombastically cheesy as a traveling-circus performance, so when the finale of “Wood Pigeon” locates Clayson in a pure singer-songwriter territory, with keyboards accompanying his creaking voice, there’s cathartic fatigue to wrap up this wondrously weird work.
After all, there’s still time for more memories and reveries.
****1/3
