THE HEAVY CIRCLES
“The Heavy Circles”
One of my very favorite records of the last ten years or so is Harper Simon’s self-titled debut album, released in 2009. Sparking folk-rock with some lovely baroque pop touches, it still gets frequent spins on my stereo. A conversation with one of the owners of a local record store alerted me to the fact that Simon had in fact recorded an earlier album with his stepmother Edie Brickell under the name The Heavy Circles, released just a year prior. It’s a solid slice of dreamy psych-pop.
As alluded to above, Harper Simon is the son of Paul Simon. Indeed, I first saw Harper Simon playing the young son of the lead character in Paul Simon’s foray into feature films, One Trick Pony. In that movie, he is shown briefly playing the piano, but the guitar is his primary instrument. A graduate of the Berklee College of Music, Simon has been active in music since the 1990s. A good friend of Sean Lennon, he has played with Yoko Ono on several occasions as well as providing some guitar for Lennon’s Friendly Fire LP (Lennon returns the favor on both The Heavy Circles album and Simon’s solo debut). The Heavy Circles project began when Simon brought Brickell into the studio for some jam sessions and, finding a groove, decided to record the resulting songs for a proper album, essentially as a side-project. The sessions included contributions from a variety of notable guests: in addition to Lennon, the album features Martha Wainwright, Matt Johnson, Oren Bloedow of Elysian Fields and Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda from Cibo Matto. The Heavy Circles name helped everyone keep a low profile and the album was released in 2008 on Dynamite Child Records.
The album offers a blend of psych, folk-rock, and pop with occasional leaning toward shoe-gazing drones. The songs are all pretty simple—often with choruses that are merely a single word or phrase repeated—but this simplicity fits with the overall casual feel of the project. The opener is “Henri,” a moody Doors-meets-Animals jam layered with Brickell’s gentle, breathy vocals on top. “Better” is an upbeat, 4-on-the-floor pop song with a solid hook in the chorus and a pair of great guitar solos. It’s perhaps my favorite track on the album. “Ready to Play” is a bluesy―almost swampy―song with another good hook in the chorus. “Confused” is a ballad with ascending vocals and effective arpeggiated guitar figures throughout. It’s the closest thing here to what Simon would later realize on his debut album. “Easier” plies similar terrain, but features a terrifically textured arrangement of lush keys, guitars and vocals. “Need a Friend” is built upon a reggae groove that is, frankly, a little less than convincing, but the song is saved by some off-the-wall touches, including a spacey solo and a funky faux-horn chart. “Dynamite Child” evokes Elastica and Liz Phair and, while fairly derivative, is also extremely catchy and well realized. The album closes with “Oh Darling” (not the Beatles chestnut): drony, dreamy psych-mush with some great drumming by Robin Dimaggio and a little freak-out in the fade.
The Heavy Circles received generally very positive reviews, but it was, as I have said, really a side project and there was little in the way of promotion and, as far as I can tell, no touring to support the album Brickell, of course, has continued to record and perform actively, including two recent Americana projects with Steve Martin. Simon, as mentioned above, released his self-titled debut album in 2009 and a follow-up, Division Street, in 2013.
The Heavy Circles is currently out of print and while I have not seen many used copies in my local record stores, it is easily found online and usually for a song. As I write this amazon marketplace has twenty used copies starting at a mere 32 cents. If you’d like to know what Simon and Garfunkel might have sounded like if they had recorded in the aughts rather than the sixties, you’ll want to give this one a spin!
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Pop Pioneer and “Lost Treasures” writer, Peter Marston is the leader of long-running power pop band, Shplang, whose most recent album, “My Big Three Wheeler” has been described as “the Beatles meet Zappa in pop-psych Sumo match.” Peter has a new project in 2015 under the name MARSTON. Marston have a track on the latest “Power Pop Planet – Volume 5” compilation just out now and available at: www.PopGeekHeavenStore.com.
CHECK OUT SHPLANG out at this link: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/shplang
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LINKS:
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heavy_Circles
AMG Review: http://www.allmusic.com/album/the-heavy-circles-mw0000583299
Blog Post: http://www.popmatters.com/review/the-heavy-circles-the-heavy-circles/
Blog Post Mach II: http://www.hybridmagazine.com/reviews/0308/heavycircles.shtml
Feature on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18816582
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