Bill Baird has been plugging away since the start of this century, as a member of Sound Team, under the Sunset nom de plume, and as a solo artist. His third solo record is a sprawling, expansive thing – 78 minutes long – that’s almost like a psychedelic journey through the day. From a gentle beginning, it slowly builds up momentum, concluding with a trio of sombre instrumentals and a Velvet Undergroundish ballad, Dreams of Sandy, that takes its vocal melody from Big Star’s Kanga-Roo. (The Velvets have clearly had a profound influence on Baird: their deep, rich organ sound crops up throughout.) That might make it sound a bit po-faced, but it’s not. Not only is the music consistently lovely – a warm bath of sound, where tape hiss is preferred to digital cleanliness – but Baird has a sense of humour, too. The album’s most obvious standout, the lovely garage rocker Your Dark Sunglasses Won’t Make You Lou Reed, warns its subject that not only will he fail to resemble Reed, but also, “John Cale, Sterling Morrison, or even Doug Yule.” Terrific stuff.
