Alec Danger (Finland) – Mortui Vivos Docent (title track from debut album)

You know, I just love artist names. It’s one of the things that draw me towards them when I’m offered five or six pieces to review each night.

This particular artist is the Cologne-based Finnish musician, Santeri Palkivaara, which immediately put me in mind of a Columbo episode which was shown on TV here recently and in which the villain was ‘The Great Santini’. And as it turns out he is a musician, of sorts.

I then I find his artist name is Alec Danger, who could be a character in a British TV series, a working class spy to rival the more upmarket James Bond or The Saint.

And then to cap it all he looks like a Terry Thomas-like character from the 1950s in the UK in one of his promotional shots, a spiv who drives around in an open top sports car and who says “Well hello” in the most suggestive voice you can imagine to all the pretty girls. So full of contradictions and I haven’t even heard him sing yet.

This is his first solo project, ‘Mortui Vivos Docent’ (‘The Dead Teach the Living’), which is a pretty good way of summing up the UK right now so I’m all in already.

And it appears he draws inspiration from 70s prog, psychedelic and krautrock as well as jazz, 80s pop and ambient electronica. That’s pretty wide-ranging. Genre fluid as they say. More strings to his bow.

Now here’s an interesting thing. There are a surprising number of tracks carrying that title and, would you believe it, a podcast which examines the case for Lucy Letby, an imprisoned British nurse for multiple murder who might just turn out to be the worst case of miscarriage of justice this country has ever known.

All that prompted me to focus on that title track. It’s only 2 minutes 43 seconds long; others go up to 10 minutes. But less is often more and it is here.

It starts off sounding like we are in the Dalai Lama’s Palace at Lhasa, and then immediately the Islamic call to prayer rings out, delivered by what sounds like it could be a badly tuned didgeridoo (actually a kamanche, a Persian bowed instrument), before a harp (?) plays descending scales.

And that’s all in the first 15 seconds. You certainly get your money’s worth.

Thereafter, well the best way I can describe it is to ask you to imagine that you’re in a sci-fi movie bar scene, populated by characters from across the universe for whom the bar has created its very own mix tape to satisfy as many of them as possible.

Something you can chill to, or dance to if you’ve got five legs.

And then towards the end the spaceship reaches the edge of the known universe and discovers God, hiding in a Black Hole. But he ain’t coming out. Wait though; he might do in the next song. A theme of death followed by regeneration is common throughout the album as one track merges into another, each track serving as a fragment of the larger entity.

If you think that’s an abstract way of reviewing a track, wait until you hear it and draw your own conclusions.

There is experimental music and then there is this. Music for Spaceports, perhaps.

Are all the tracks like this?

Don’t be silly. First and foremost he’s a singer songwriter, capable of churning out pop, soft/yacht rock and harder sounds and the full panoply is on display here.

Apart from ‘Alec’ there are 14 other musos contributing here and another track that particularly caught my attention is the last one, the 10-minute one, ‘Shake your cage’, which falls somewhere between Pink Floyd, Yes, Jethro Tull and the Beach Boys and which will assuredly shake yours.

https://alecdanger.bandcamp.com/track/mortui-vivos-docent