In a millennial era in which every artist's every ass-scratch is discussed ad
nauseam on some message board somewhere, creating a modern-day mythology
ain't so easy. Liam Hayes, the large-haired fellow hiding behind the
moniker Plush, has taken a fairly decent crack at mythology, via the
means of mystery. For about his first five years at this Plush game,
Hayes had a single single — the seven-inch "Found a Little Baby"/"Three-Quarters
Blind Eyes" — to his name. Two tracks of orchestrated pop-music
steeped in cockeyed revisionism, its one-off status endeared it to indie-geeks
the world over. With only two songs to work with, Hayes' fans made him
a romanticized figure, spinning yarns about the album he was hard at
work on, the as-good-as-gospel gossip being that Plush was putting together
a pop-record so opulent it'd make Eric Matthews seem stripped-down. When
he suddenly broke the silence in 1998, though, it was with a record, More
You Becomes You, in which a lonesome Liam sat solo at the piano,
Joe-Jacksoning his way through a suite of songs with no other instrumental
accompaniment. The radically stripped-down set recast Hayes, who once
seemed defined by his moniker, as a faltering troubadour, though the
speculative hearsay was that the album had been made off-the-cuff, as
a sort of discographical detour away from the car-crash that version
one of the definitive Plush album had b'come. And, Julie Christie, the
rumors were true. Frustrated at his faltering first attempt at such a
disc, he had cut More You Becomes You to buy him some time; and
in 1999 he returned once more towards making that big orchestral pop
record, that definitive Plush album, Fed. Hayes spent the next
three years making various versions thereof, going from studio to studio,
adding instruments upon instruments, running up a bill that'd make Shaun
Ryder blush, sparing no expense in his pursuit of artistic happiness.
By the time he'd finished, the album had cost so much that the licensing
fees grew to levels an indie-label'd call "outrageous." Domino and Drag
City blanched at dishing up such cash, and the Japanese label, After
Hours, that did decide to pay the piper (releasing the record in late
2002) did so only under the condition that it'd never be released outside
of Japan. Which seemed to fit perfectly with Hayes' mystery. The perfectionist
had finally realized his over-the-top retro-pop symphony, and yet, now,
no one'd ever get to hear it. The only real surprise, then, has come
with this release of Underfed. Described as the "demos" for Fed,
this disc is, really, just one of the many "early versions" Hayes made
of the album, less a collection of basic test recordings than
a largely-realized rendition that didn't come close to the songsmith's
grand plans and grander ambitions. To help Hayes, ever the perfectionist,
release such to the public, the record works with a certain artifice,
its artwork faking to be a CDR, replete with Post-It note proclaiming "Glitch
at end," the recordings featuring not just a glitch, but a fragment of
a song stuck between two others, and a conversation between Hayes and
Bob Weston (about an awry vocal, no less) preceding another. By deliberately
leaving in things so obviously imperfect, Hayes is keeping us forever
aware that this is the sketch, not the finished portrait. Largely sticking
to guitar/bass/drums, with various analog organs — most notably
the Chamberlain — adding on hints of the opulence that'd come down
the line later, Underfed is sort of like Hayes's equivalent of
those Smile bootlegs that, until Brian Wilson ruined it for everyone
last year, only hinted at the final, unrealized vision that never came
to be. Given more people are likely to hear Underfed than've heard Fed,
here we get a Plush album that hints at another Plush album (mythology,
ho!); one whose recordings take attention away from the arrangements,
whilst hinting at even greater arrangements. When "Having It All" has
Hayes singing, in that cracked voice, "Ice cream and honey/ Stained-glass
and money/ Preached and bleached/ You reached me for my own good," before
the Chamberlain's strings come in, it hints at the grandness innate in
Hayes's "classic songwriter" ways; yet, without the real string section,
it also places attention back on the songsmith's songs. If these recordings
are deemed the emaciated beginnings of their satiated conclusions, it
hardly harms the songs themselves, Hayes's particular brand of pop chops
having been honed significantly for this set, moving beyond mere Beach
Boys/Beatles pastiche, and into some realm of minor-league genius.
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