Simeon Soul Charger – Harmony Square

A Peg in Harmony's Whole

Simeon Soul Charger is a band of four Americans from Ohio making folk-psychedelic music in Germany. Sehr gut and far out. Their album Harmony Square is a rock opus of sorts and its fifteen separate tracks are merged into the conceptual whole with a variety of guest musicians on violins, cello, tabla/other percussion, and a saw harp. It’s more acid folk harmony and narrative than psychedelic experimentation up to notional fifth track Spinning Across The Grass where guitar and effects play a more prominent part behind a grunge sound that breaks into momentary staccato singing which got me thinking of Gentle Giant as the automatic mental-precursor-search kicked in. It’s hard to pinpoint the obvious influences – notional sixth Doris reminds me of latter-day Beatles. Even more obvious reference points would be The Pretty Things and elements of The Kinks, but the guitar solo on this ‘sixth’ track is also Pink Floyd. A bit of Zappa? It has to all be there either by intention or aural osmosis, these guys clearly steeped in the sounds of the late 60s and early 70s with, as I’ve said, the spinning across the grass grunge being reprieved. Notional eighth The Pipers’s Prize is pseudo-operatic in its harmonising, and at this early stage of the listening experience I’m following melody and performance rather than concentrating on and hearing the storytelling, a yarn summarised in their press release as The protagonist finds himself by chance at the ‘Harmony Square’, the marketplace of a secluded village, and experiences in addition to the social ills different solution against these [and I suspect an element of lost translation from German to English in that ending] OR, as their blog summarises it more tightly as well as introducing a significant additional plot twist, an elaborate story about an alien circus descending on Earth to offer transcendence to a sea of oppressed humans.

Notional tenth The Changing Wind and Reign [clever, eh?] is pure sweet-scented folk with close harmony and violin which is best described as generic of the time it so ably reflects, but at its end the melody is swept aside by a more methodical approach because the narrative requires advancement, and I suspect this will be the ultimate ‘problem’ with this album as a casual listening experience: there is clear compromise between creating distinct and memorable tunes with writing passages that focus on delivering the tale. I think we need bands and record companies to take risks like this, and it is a brave, worthy challenge that SSC has taken and quite successfully achieved, especially for an audience whose aural peg fits squarely into harmonies.