Joewi Verhoeven wears his influences lightly for someone just the other side of teendom. Born of Dutch and Chinese parents, brought up in Holland and re-locating to Beijing for Mandarin study and film school, he has managed to find the time to soak up the post-grunge tunefulness of Soundgarden whilst being at home with the pre-blues minstrelsy of Mississippi John Hurt, entering guitar world via a Nirvana portal like so many other early teens he's ended up more between Arthur Lee and Roddy Frame rather than totally sold on the easier world of post-rock noodling abstraction. All to say that Joewi (say "joowi") is more about tunes than most rock musicians these days.

The band called Arrows Made of Desire (a name lifted from a line in Jimi Hendrix's awesome "Voodoo Chile" where he misquotes William Blake's "Jerusalem") has gone through a few incarnations, but the creative pivot has always been Joewi Verhoeven. His debut set for Tag Team Records, "Songs That Sell Fish", was not much more than a collection of loose demos, pre-built fuzzy-fi, near zero production values, almost field recordings, but with enough raw promise to indicate better was to come. Joewi linked with bassist Rutger Brauer (formerly of Jimmyhat) and Xiao Dou, on loan from Beijing's hippest jazz outfit the Red Hand Jazz Band, for the sessions that resulted in Songs That Sell Out; starting in late Spring 2008 and running on and off through the following six months. Recorded at Yuli Chen's Sweet Factory in Beijing, an Aladdin's cave of analogue gear rescued from NYC studios, the song structures on the album were captured fast around the live rhythm section before a more measured building of the feeling for each track. The set moves through instant pop classics such as the brass-punched snarl of "Missing Out" or "Dependency" one of those tunes you've known all your life, a sexy semi-samba in "Race", the pastoral plaint of "Bear it Calmly", the angst-ridden dissonance of "Revelation" and the jazzed-out "Heroes Hit Bottom"; perhaps its no accident that by the time the last track "Denouement" arrives with an unmistakeably contemporary stamp it can be taken as indication of what's to come.

All the songs here are written and arranged by Joewi Verhoeven, engineered by Yuli Chen - pre and post his involvement in the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony; Yuli also played the various keyboards that may be heard tinkling intros and outros. Vintage and also legendary BBC DJ Steve Barker (On the Wire) was brought in for fatherly attention of all the young people involved in this project plus random co-production assistance for Joewi throughout the process and the tracks were mastered into a shiny things by Mr Fred Kervorkian of Avatar Studios NYC, whose mind and fingers have previously manipulated everyone from Sonic Youth to Pharoah Sanders. Enjoy but resist whistling along!

	King of Lonedom		Folk/Acoustic Rock/Americana
	For-Itself		Alternative Pop Rock

Comments                                                Add new Comment   View All