Super review by Cal Gibson, of The Secret Soul Society

Ripped pants, soup kitchens, “worm ladies” and faint breaths on misted windows: David Michael Moore brings a universe twisted and surreally envisioned over thirty years of determinedly individualistic music-making. Think Tony Joe White side-swiped by Tony Montana then think again, and again and again.

What you want in an artist is a world-view that refracts itself into brave new shapes and shingles, a way of expressing what’s missing in our money, money, money-mad environment. What you get with Mr. Moore is a life outsourced to pickup trucks and flowery expressions, missives beamed in from an imagination set on fire.

Let’s zone in on those Worm Ladies: Moore sings with warmth and soft-focus, a pulling away from the mundane into a speckled simulation: ‘Worm ladies come / worm ladies go…..like ghosts out on the river / they’re coming back for more.’ Jesus pops up and a late night spirituality spreads itself with some abandon: the moon gets to witness the shenanigans and the remnants of a lost Tom Waits skit get replayed until the worms are indeed masters of all they survey.

Donny Quixote is almost eleven minutes of stumbled-jazz: Monk via the freeway of love, a bassline that doesn’t walk so much as pirouette, piano chords fluttering in the breeze, a lost lament for lives given away, tossed aside by the corporate hell gods, the sound of the marginalised not giving a shit. It’s a doozy, Donny.

Orion’s In The Bucket comes with a sliver of Sun Ra, perhaps, a cosmic glance at our hamstrung-days and glitched out nights. More piano, more rhythmic collisions, more urbane utterings from Moore: if Gilles Peterson hasn’t played this yet then it’s only a matter of time. Torch songs for the tremulous, tyre-tracks up and down your spine. Moore is way beyond keeping it unreal: he’s not keeping anything at all. All this shall pass.

Across The Field jitters and judders, ‘like someone walking slow / coming across a field.’ This is countryside pastoral jemmied into the here and now: the troubadour packing up his bag of tricks and hitching a ride to Soulsville. Randy Newman on bad drugs and methadone: a farmyard full of leftfield funk and lo-fi thrills.

Lunch Is Having Lunch is an absolute delight from start to finish: the sound of a man refusing the usual tropes for a one-eyed undertaker blowing a feudal horn. Or is that flugel horn? Moore doesn’t know and doesn’t care: he’s inviting you in but he’s not stumping up for the matinee. Ulyssa have once again come up with the goods: this is sad bug eyes, antibiotics for the soul, darkened houses of the holy. Lunchtime already? Grub’s up people.

David Michael Moore’s Lunch Is Having Lunch is out now on Ulyssa.