New Solo Album From Mike Donovan

Since 2011, Mike Donovan has been a Drag City stalwart, first with Sic Alps, then as a solo and with The Peacers — but Mike “The Mighty Flashlight” Fellows has been a behind-the-scenes figure at Drag City since the early early days, playing live and on record with Royal Trux, Silver Jews and Will Oldham. A multi-hyphenate, Fellows has also contributed to releases from Endless Boogie, Pigeons, Weeping Bong Band and Prison in recent years. So when these two rambling musicians found themselves in adjacent communities in upstate New York, Mike D brought Mike F into the process of his new solo album.

The two-Mike combination makes this fourth Donovan solo album hit all kinds of high-watermarks! Playing in the cracked kingdom of sound and the garden of verse, the Mighty Flashlight alternately accents and balances Mike’s eccentricities with his playing and knob-spinning. With the Flashlight shining bright upon him, Donovan’s serpentine path becomes ever so much more elastic, heightened from line to line, change to change, its motility creating different shapes in our ears. The Mighty Flashlight's own kind of stereo imagining informs Donovan’s smoky subterranean haze with additional depth of field, while still allowing all the wayward details within the arrangement to diverge as one.

On the lead single "Planet Metley", Mike and the Mighty Flashlight draw bonus colour out of the sooty stomp that has typified Mike D’s music. Donovan’s acid tongue guides us through a hard-stereo maze of glammy, garagy psych-rock, his falsetto vocals floating dreamily, then cutting like diamond on glass. Mike and Mighty wind it up all together!

Mike D’s music, in all phases, takes the form of a next-phase roots-pop: soaked in the traditional waters of rock and roll and passed through a variety of after-punk sonic sieves, highlighted with DIY and lo-fi values. and making a jolly hallucinatory racket, at that! He prefers a particular density of obtuse angles colliding sweet and hot noise, an arrangement he has perfected over all his Sic Alps/solo/The Peacers years; his innate understanding of the mechanics of a pop song wends purposefully through the junk-strewn landscape, sharing secrets with cipher in hand. Playing in this cracked kingdom of sound/garden of verse, Mighty Flashlight alternately accents and balances Mike’s eccentricities with his playing and knob-spinning — and with the Flashlight shining bright upon him, Donovan’s serpentine path becomes ever so much more elastic, heightened from line to line, change to change, its motility creating different shapes in our ears. Mighty’s own kind of stereo imagining informs Donovan’s smoky subterranea with additional depth of field, while still allowing all the wayward details within the arrangement to diverge as one.

Mike and Mighty wind it all together: art punk utterance and top 40 radio junk of yore, the primitivity that formed recorded music in its youth, honkytonk romanticism, liminal chamber-folk and ever-present disassociated psychedelia, transformed via self-medication into a gleeful, extramusical ennui while giving the listener impetus to sing along with Mike’s patented unlikely combos of melody and lyric, as re:

• “The Godly Orator said / Mike can you play us / a pile of old words from a can”
• “When you went inside the globe / and I stood outside the show/ the sky looked prepared to snow”
• “Here comes/ here comes/the missing drum”

Sonoumbulant! Sequiturial! Munificent! The sprawl of sounds and tunes, wayward, yet compact, is so easy to admire. It might be easier when you sing ’em, though—but it’s easiest of all when Mike does! Slip inside an eternal jukebox of the mind with Mike Donovan Meets the Mighty Flashlight.