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Features Summer Of Stoltz Sunday, December 30, 2007 Kelley Stoltz Prepared To Round Up His Australian Kelley Gang To Tour His Latest Album. By Martin Jones.
 According to Kelley Stoltz’s latest Sub Pop biography, the man is a “bona fide cult sensation” in Australia!
“Yeah what do you think?” Stoltz smirks down the phone line from his San Francisco home. “Can I get away with that?”
Well, who’s gonna dispute it?
“I don’t know, as long as you don’t. That’s not what this whole call’s about right? Getting to the bottom of the lies in the bio?”
Far be it from Rhythms to poke holes in the blossoming mythology of one of the world’s brightest modern psych rock genius. Hell, we were the first magazine to give Kelley Stoltz a cover!
Nope, if anything we’re doing our darnedest to fuel Stoltz’s shooting star, especially since hearing his latest album Circular Sounds. As a completely self-taught, bedroom music maker, Stoltz has exhibited exceptional progress between albums, last year’s sweetly psyched out Between The Branches earning him a spot on the Sub Pop roster.
Though not a great deal has changed in the way Stoltz continues to write, perform and record his music, Circular Sounds is an appreciably more focused effort – it flows smoothly with a consistency of tone – a seductive grin rather than an out-loud laugh. It’s a collection of almost uniformly three-to-four minute vocal pop songs anchored by a distinct voice and augmented by subtle, home-brewed ingenuity.
With album number three, Between The Branches, Stoltz saw his Bowie-aping fervour being replaced by a more mature and individual musical personality. So where are we with number four?
“I think we’re getting close, you know. I think we’re getting close to feeling pretty good about a representation at least of one part of myself. I mean there’s the stand-up comic, there’s the free-association, new-age confrontation artist – and these things are all bubbling under – but as far as the singer-songwriter person, I think we’re getting pretty close. I think I’ve almost lost the English accent entirely. And the only thing I can tell you that I nicked was the line from The Dukes Of Stratosphear, you know the XTC sister band. Other than that I think I’m in the clear.”
While the press has gleefully painted Stoltz with the San Fran psych-rock brush, hailing him as Skip Spence’s successor, San Francisco is not where Stoltz left his heart. It seems to be just the first place he stepped off when he decided to flee his Michigan home. He seems to have been embraced by City By The Bay now, but he struggled against public apathy when stepping onto its stages. Indeed, it was Australia that offered Stoltz his first wave of appreciably public appreciation. He’s returned it by spending most of his winters (our summers) here touring with his Aussie back up band. True to form, he’ll be back next month.
Anyway… as Stoltz suggests, you’d be outta line to try to keep pinning the Moby Grape badge on him these days. There’s surely a lingering respect for the Thin White Duke, and a noticeable nod to Brian Wilson, but Circular Sounds presents Kelley Stoltz in focused identity – to the point where identifying specific influences is pretty pointless.
“No I didn’t,” Stoltz denies any conscious aim at a more consistent tone. “I don’t know, I’ve heard that from a couple of people, that the others were a bit more scattershot, you know for better or for worse, there’s good things about both. Yeah I think a lot of that owes to the fact that it was done in a relatively similar period of time rather than drawn from three and a half years of making records and uncertainty about who’s going to do what. It took me two years with this one and it’s been done for a good eight months so it was all pretty much done quick and I think that definitely helps artists figure out where they are, who they are, and where they’re going if they can get a bit more of a regular routine as far as releases. You’re grabbin’ out of the same bag instead of several different bags.”
Circular Sounds is available on Sub Pop through Stomp on February 4. Kelley Stoltz tours in February: Friday 8 at Jive Adelaide; Saturday 9 at Corner Hotel, Melbourne; Sunday 10 at Theatre Royal Castlemaine; Thursday 14 at the Great Northern Byron bay; Saturday 15 at the Troubadour Brisbane; Sunday 16 at the Annandale, Sydney.
Read the full article in January Rhythms.
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