Untroubled Waters: Plumbing the Depths of Richard Swift's Atlantic Ocean

Though it can at times seem shimmering, loopy or vaguely unhinged, this is a fastidiously conceived album with quite the musical pedigree. Much of Atlantic Ocean was recorded on an analog Studer A80 tape machine sold to him by friend Jeff Tweedy. Nostalgia heard out of context often sounds delightfully new, as do many of these songs. But some, such as “Bat Coma Motown” and the album’s sleek centerpiece, “Lady Luck,” are so true to their genre as to sound like portals to musical eras past rather than reinventions.

Nowadays we’re so used to the ubiquitous warmed-over nod to past pop forms that Swift’s out-and-out motown or vaudeville sounds can be bracing, especially encountered back-to-back as they are laid out here. But they are also transporting, straight lines back to Abbey Road and Tin Pan Alley. Even under the perhaps unfair impression that Richard Swift is merely playing Dr. Frankenstein on this album, we want to hear more from the monster he’s sewn together using lost limbs of disparate pop genres.

It’s difficult to know exactly what Richard Swift is getting at; his tone is cheerfully apocalyptic, his instrumentation wickedly clever, but his lyrics are opaque enough to mask any clear intent. His many affectations are a bit too effective, as there is little intimacy to Atlantic Ocean.Whereas Rufus Wainwright's anachronistically hip songs function to narrate his public persona, Richard Swift seems to present himself detached from any social context.

He does offer clues on the Beatles-esque track “R.I.P.” singing “save your prays/ I’m an unbeliever/ and I can sleep at night/ I got no one to make me cry.” It seems most likely that Atlantic Ocean is Swift’s rebuttal of his past career as musical evangelist; under the name Dicky Ochoa, he wrote and recorded Christian praise music from the age of 14. It makes sense that an artist disillusioned with music produced to manipulate the listener’s sensibilities would evolve a craft that eluded any easy interpretation. On “Hallelujah, Goodnight!” Swift states, “it isn’t for a laugh, it isn’t for a show.” Maybe Swift’s goal is about what his music isn’t, more importantly than what it is -- which turns out to be unforgettable.