SPOON AND RAFTER

Mojave 3’s founding members are vocalist/guitarist Neil Halstead, bassist/vocalist Rachel Goswell, and drummer Ian McCutcheon. The band broke cover in 1995, when a six-track demo impressed 4AD sufficiently to offer them a deal, despite a then-prevailing musical climate of bumptious Britpop that seemed totally at odds with what Mojave 3 were doing. Their incongruence was hardly surprising given that Halstead, Goswell and McCutcheon had formed as members of definitive shoegazers Slowdive, while guitarist Simon Rowe had previously served with dreampop kindred spirits Chapterhouse.
Mojave 3’s debut, Ask Me Tomorrow, was a refreshingly stripped down collection that changed little from the original demos. Halstead’s melodic, folk- and country-tinged songs drew favourable (if lazy) comparisons to Nick Drake, Cowboy Junkies and Bob Dylan. Three years later, Out Of Tune continued where the first album left off and showed a group that had grown in both confidence and cohesiveness. Third album Excuses For Travellers contained some of the most ambitious Halstead compositions yet. Spoon and Rafter followed three years later marking another shift for the band. While still containing echoes of singer-songwriters and alt-country, the record represents a technicolor expansion of their palette that utilizes electronics, glockenspiels, melodica, and Beatlesque production. Their final album, 2006’s Puzzles Like You is a positively bright and fun record that feels right at home next to indie rock contemporaries like The Shins and Band of Horses, while sounding nearly unrecognizable next to the band they were on Ask Me Tomorrow.

Released in October 1995, Ask Me Tomorrow could have easily been the fourth Slowdive album, sounding like an acoustic deconstruction of the group’s early recordings, still dreamlike and ethereal but recontextualized by discernible lyrics and a country-folk aesthetic.

“We put quite a lot of reverb on the vocals,” Neil recalls of the primitive recording style, “and because we were all in one room recording straight to tape, there was a lot of bleed, it made everything sound really reverby. It gave the mix this really cool, murky sound and sort of inadvertently bridges the gap to Slowdive a little.”

Channelling the sorrowful songwriting of Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Townes Van Zant, and Fairport Convention, as well as contemporaries like Mazzy Star, Tindersticks, and Cowboy Junkies, this tone is set by the transcendent opener “Love Songs on the Radio,” in which Rachel’s angelic vocals are suspended in air by slow, sleepwalking guitar and minimalist bass and drum flourishes.

“I sang that song sitting on a mattress in the kitchen of Neil’s flat,” Rachel recalls. “It was exciting because I really enjoyed the songs, and it felt like this entirely new thing was forming with only me, Neil and Ian.”

“It was a very easy record to make, very off the cuff,” Ian confirms. “The atmosphere had been so toxic at the end of Slowdive, that it just felt so positive to be starting over with Rachel, Neil and myself, having a good time doing something completely different.”