The Ghost of Corelli – The AK Poets

Of all the acts performing on the local circuit, it is probably David Marx’s music that resonates furthest back in time with me, having first caught The Coincidence live when we all looked much younger and thinner, sometime in the mid eighties. It’s been a long journey generically, from Waterboys-esque rock, to Springsteen blue collar romanticism, the urgency of The Clash to the story telling of Dylan and Waits; they have all played their part. Geographically too the road has meandered from New York, Brighton, Berlin and Toulouse before finally bringing him back to where it all began.

The current musical vehicle for his songs goes by the name of The AK-Poets, where he is joined by seasoned players Pat Luszcz and Richard Skidmore on bass and drums respectively and they have just captured 5 of their current creations on an e.p. called Ghost of Corelli.

It’s a record that follows a wonderfully balanced dynamic curve, topped and tailed by the biggest songs on offer here. Sicilian Satire lays out a wonderful welcome mat of joyous, raucous rhythms and boisterous beats and Eleven Thousand Martyred Virgins is a swansong that fuses slogan, phrase and fable onto an epic musical journey staying just the right side of avant garde as it casts off the chains of musical convention and wigs out like it’s playing a basement party in 1972.

It is between these more obvious rock and roll drives  the band channel something altogether more delicate, In an Empty Room and Sweet Dreams both painting poeticism and describing heart worn highways that we have all travelled at some point.

The lead track, well, the most effortlessly obvious candidate for a single release at least, is Cassius Clay, a song that the likes of Elvis Costello would have killed to have written back in his punked up pop formative years, a song too that between the epic workouts and the chilled reflections shows that when they turn their minds to straight down the line melodic and immediately accessible tunes, they can also summon those with relative ease.

And if they are able to capture all that theatre, charisma, dynamism, energy and wistful in just five songs, imagine what a live show has to offer.