Scrolling back through Tyler Ballgame’s Instagram posts is a striking experience. Barely a year ago, they largely comprised flyers for – and cameraphone footage from – gigs in tiny Los Angeles bars, the kind that make as much virtue out of the fact that entry is free as of who’s playing: one bills his performance alongside a vintage clothes market and “tarot readings”. A support slot with a minor jam band called Eggy is a very big deal indeed; the news that he’s playing a show in London is greeted with disbelief: “What,” asks one baffled correspondent, “does London know of Ballgame?”
Things changed dramatically over the ensuing 12 months. Not long after his first trip to London, a video of him performing live at a Los Angeles bar called the Fable began circulating online. By the time he came back to the UK to perform at Brighton industry showcase the Great Escape, he had signed to Rough Trade. Critical hosannas began raining down on Ballgame: he has variously been compared to Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Jim Morrison and Tim Buckley.
He also turned out to be catnip for what’s left of the music press, an interviewee with a penchant for the hippy-friendly philosophy of Alan Watts and an intriguing backstory. A Berklee College of Music dropout who spent years sequestered in his parents’ basement, struggling with depression and a gargantuan appetite for marijuana, he underwent a “spiritual awakening” thanks to the work of German self-help guru Eckhart Tolle – also beloved of Kendrick Lamar – and the intervention of a dietician and counsellor called Courtney Huard, who was subsequently murdered by her husband. Moreover, he announced, Tyler Ballgame wasn’t just a stage name, it was a persona the former Tyler Perry had invented, drawing on his background in drama: playing the part of an “idealised frontman from the 60s and 70s” gave him “the licence to show more” of himself.
It’s a dichotomy borne out in his vocal style, which on his debut album is straightforwardly beautiful – a bruised, brooding croon that sweeps into an emotive falsetto as if doing so were the easiest thing in the world – and slightly theatrical. There’s an audible, actorly relish about its mix of careful enunciation and mangled vowels (“mama always told me that the cream would roooot” – ie “rot” – he sings on Matter of Taste), and, at its most audibly Elvis-y or Orbison-esque, the faint sense that he’s deliberately courting comparison.
Similarly, the lyrics tend toward open-hearted, no-filter confessional: “I learned your name but missed its meaning when I didn’t know how to feel,” offers the title track, not the last time the album refers to experiencing life anew after the cloud of depression has lifted, albeit haunted by the fear the darkness might return. But there’s something knowing about the music, audibly the work of people with a deep knowledge of 70s singer-songwriters and an understanding of how to recreate their sound. The album was largely recorded live, using old-fashioned analogue methods (every track features audible tape hiss) by producer Jonathan Rado, whose clients include Miley Cyrus, the Killers and, perhaps most pertinently here, 70s-obsessed duo the Lemon Twigs. The sound is warm and punchy, the vocals swaddled in reverb and slapback echo that doesn’t so much evoke 50s rock’n’roll as artists reaching for that sound 20 years later. The vaguely Beatlesque cast to the melody of I Believe in Love (And That’s Fine) is underscored by the vocal being recorded in a way that deliberately evokes the John Lennon of Mind Games or Walls and Bridges.
Ballgame’s songwriting is a curious, occasionally jarring mix of earnestness – “look into my eyes and you’ll see it for real – I can only sing how I feel” – and artifice that, like the Bill Withers cosplay of Michael Kiwanuka’s 2012 debut Home Again, is perhaps a little too eager to suggest that its author belongs in a classic rock lineage. Still, the quality of the material is such that the listener is swept along while it plays – the abundance of gorgeous melodies, most notably on Deepest Blue and Waiting So Long; the magical tempo shifts of You’re Not My Baby Tonight – and stagy or not, it’s hard not to find yourself seduced by Ballgame’s voice when it hits a cathartic wordless climax on Goodbye My Love. You can understand why he’s caused so much excitement so quickly, and a certain overeagerness is a perfectly admissible flaw on a debut album. You get the feeling that For the First Time, Again might be a starting point, and that, as happened with Kiwanuka, better might come when Tyler Ballgame takes a step away from his influences.
This week Alexis listened to
RIP Magic – 5words
5words was produced by LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, and you can see why he views RIP Magic as kindred spirits: a motorik guitar drone ultimately explodes into dancefloor synths.
