The Civil Twilight’s lead singer Steven Dayvid McKellar, has his first solo album coming out later this year. He recently premiered a new song from that album, a melancholy electronic pop track called “Don’t Ask Me Why.” From the blipping electronic beat to McKellar’s subdued vocal delivery, it’s a promising preview for the new album, which is called ETHIO.
| From its structure to the rich instrumentation, “Don’t Ask Me Why” recalls Amnesiac/Kid A era Radiohead. The track is accompanied by a music video, which features various shots including silhouettes, saturated clips of random everyday objects and other images that complement the experimental pop track. |
By the time musician and painter Steven Dayvid McKellar had transferred to paper the host of ideas, images and phrases that would become “ETHIO,” he’d filled a wall of his writing room with yellow Post-It notes. As if plotting out some vast conspiracy, he’d profiled a set of characters, placed them in uniquely American settings, commenced drawing connections.
McKellar’s solo debut after establishing himself as founder of the acclaimed rock band Civil Twilight, “ETHIO” is a kind of musical manifestation of his conclusions. A streamlined set of songs driven by warm, precisely arranged synthetic and acoustic tones, its eight songs celebrate not only melody and rhythm, but the space and silence among the measures.
In the winter of 2019, McKellar and his wife had just touched down at JFK after a half year in Paris. From an ocean away, it had been easy to respond to American politics with chuckles of disbelief. It was concerning, but in the abstract. Then, as if piercing some portal, the artist, who is South African, says he “stood in the passport line at JFK and observed with new eyes the America I was returning to.” It wasn’t pretty.
Back at the McKellars’ adopted home of Nashville, Steven scribbled on the Post-It wall of his studio. When McKellar surveyed what he’d crafted, he says, “I saw a neighborhood — eight individuals, young and old, from all walks of life, seemingly unrelated yet tied together by a mutual frustration, alienation, disappointment, dashed expectations and broken promises. And I was right there among them.”Lyrics angled for attention. He wrote of mysterious goos “oozing through the soil,” of “angry spirits that curse that land,” of “Hot Wheels on the freeway,” of a capitalist character, driven by greed, stripping America for its parts eager to “rape it, he’ll scrape it, he’ll take it with nothing to spare.” It was a harsh landscape, but also incredibly hopeful, filled with characters who, “with all their churning, acid emotion, were proof of something. Proof of life.”
McKellar earned his first attention as the founder, singer and principal songwriter of Civil Twilight, whose acclaimed trio of albums starting in 2010 propelled tours performing with Florence + The Machine, Smashing Pumpkins, Silversun Pickups, Jimmy Eat World and more. In 2016, Civil Twilight (which also features McKellar’s brother Andrew) announced it was going on hiatus.
Nearly four years later: “ETHIO.” Written, recorded and performed by McKellar, it’s an album as striking for its musicality as for its lyricism. Songs pulse and hum, driving by a sonic palette that’s as precisely arranged as his writing.
We’re bombarded with big questions daily: What does it mean to be a moral person in an increasingly immoral system? What, exactly, is patriotism? Who are “The People,” and how can the powerful so easily to divide them?
With “ETHIO,” Steven Dayvid McKellar tangles with these ideas and more. The result is a singular work, one that, both musically and lyrically, captures the essential confusion of our times.
