Scott Cook Closes 'Guy Fawkes Day, 1947' With 'Good Things'
Somewhere in Scott Cook's account of what he admires in David Bowie's final record, Blackstar, is the thought that hiring jazz musicians for a record that is essentially not jazz was a cool move and a thoroughly Bowie one. Cook, who lives in Montreal and has close friends tied to the city's jazz scene, did the same thing on Guy Fawkes Day, 1947. You can hear the consequences most plainly at the end of the album, in 'Good Things', where the band plays for more than a minute before anyone sings a note.
That opening groove is worth sitting inside. The snare lands on 2 and 4 under closed hi-hats, a steel-string acoustic strums away, and electric piano and clean guitar comp around the edges with the unhurried manners of players who listen first. The bass is the thing you notice. It is warm and round, played with the fingers, walking a syncopated melodic line that never settles into a loop, and it sits right at the front of the mix. When the voice finally arrives, the bass stays exactly where it was, shoulder to shoulder with it, for the whole song. On a rock record that is a choice, and it is the kind of choice a jazz rhythm section makes without being asked.
Cook's voice is dry, centred and low, somewhere between baritone and lower tenor, and his cadence is so conversational it often brushes against speech. "Sitting here alone, with my gin and my guitar," he sings, and he sounds like a man telling you about his evening rather than performing it. Harmonies come in on the first chorus, the lead doubled and the backing voices spread left and right, so each "Good thing" line opens out a little wider than the verse that led to it. Later, clean electric guitar threads around the vocal in the fourth verse, and an electric piano or synth takes a solo break over the rhythm section.
Cook names Peter Gabriel, Roger Waters and above all Bowie as the songwriters he might model himself on, and Pink Floyd's long instrumental patience is audible in how willing this song is to stretch. He also holds a PhD in music theory. He describes being drawn to the unexpected, reaching past the first harmonic idea that comes to mind when he sets his vocal melodies, and caring more about how the individual voices move from one chord to the next than about the progression as a block. It shows in the bridge, where string pads swell beneath him and the vocal quickens into faster, more syncopated phrasing. The ground seems to tilt without any lurch you could point at.
The words travel the same way. A song that drifts into daydreams of flying "So high it's hard to think about myself down on the ground" ends up behind the wheel of a car that isn't his, with "No brakes on which I can rely", the narrator waving goodbye out of the window and laughing as "I feel the tears escape my eyes". An instrumental stretch of strings, driving bass and drums carries the momentum before the final verse, and then "The wall ahead greets the night".
Everything stops on a crash that echoes into silence. What follows is a coda of vocoded, robotic speech I couldn't quite make out, and glitchy synth warbles, cut off clean. It is a startling way to close an album dedicated to Cook's late father, who was born on 5 November 1947, and it is the moment where the Bowie lesson feels most fully absorbed, because nothing about it is the obvious ending. It's out now. Start at the end.
