While making his name as a touring member of bands like the Gossip, The Dirtbombs, Chain & The Gang and Spider & The Webs, Portland, Oregon-based multi-instrumentalist Christopher Sutton has built up a deep and varied oeuvre of his own. A body of work of an artist and collaborator baulking at the limitations of clear styles and genres. A place where indie pop, punk and dub coexist, where funk and garage rock walk arm in arm, and any barriers are not so much hurdled but forgotten altogether.
The latest release in Antiquated Future‘s Selected Songs series, You Brought Me Back From The Dead collects tracks from across Christopher Sutton’s career to highlight the diversity of his work. In all, the release features songs from Hornet Leg, C.O.C.O, Dub Narcotic Sound System, Cool Flowers, The Sun Ships, Hooded Hags, Sutton, Triple Daisies and The Boozles, spanning a period from the late nineties to 2019. What emerges is less a coherent collection and more a grab bag of disparate goodies, Fred Thomas’s mixing eschewing any temptation to hammer the songs into any single vibe and instead allowing them to stand apart in all their eclectic glory.
Take the pivot from the chaotic dub fun of Cool Flowers opener ‘Killing Kind Organ Dub’ into Hornet Leg’s Mekons-esque ‘Cold Fire’, the latter’s punk swagger immediately cut short as the release switches into the brooding Lynchian dreaminess of ‘I’m Leaving You’. The third track is also from the Hornet Leg project, and that this second transformation takes place within the same project hints at the breadth of Sutton’s work. “It’s akin to an ice cream scooper that has dug in and caressed my deepest secrets into a cosmic sugar cone,” as Sutton describes in the accompanying booklet. A cone with more flavours than there are stars in the sky.
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But push further into this seemingly endless variety and something else becomes apparent. Some force shared by all of the tracks no matter how different they are on the surface. From the hyperactive instrumental of ‘Baby Ornette’ to the languid spoken word ‘You Knew it’, the off-kilter Johnstonian lo-fi pop of ‘I Listen to Records’ to the cinematic intensity of ‘Leftist Regime’. Call it spirit, call it soul. “The image that sticks with me most is Chris’ face—Brow slightly furled in concentration, eyes serenely looking into some other realm,” explains Antiquated Future’s Joshua James Amberson in his own personal essay for the release. “In the music so deeply, so profoundly, that I knew even then he considered playing music a sacred act, something to be fully engaged in, not to be taken lightly or practiced without care.” A seriousness as apparent in the earliest Dub Narcotic Sound System tracks as in more recent unreleased solo songs like ‘Good Night Jaime’. A thread that sews all the seemingly contrasting parts of Sutton’s creative output into a cohesive whole.
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You Brought Me Back From The Dead (Selected Songs, 1998-2019) is out now via Antiquated Future Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.
