Mike Downey, Kicking Gas for Laughs and Hold Horses

review by dave heaton

In recent years Mike Downey – formerly of rock bands Wolfie, the New Constitution, the National Splits – has been escaping ‘rock’ conventions to a degree. Less guitar, more laptop. He creates with what seems like a freewheeling independence, making up tracks on his own and releasing them free on his own net-label, heartphone. Kicking Gas for Laughs is a lark of an album. It has a lovable looseness to it, keeping traits of his best songwriting – a dual directness/ambiguity, great pop melodies – while playing around with new sounds. As one song, “Rescue Rocket”, put it, “you don’t want to make just a simple sound”. Kicking Gas for Laughs starts out almost like a dance album, with full, sparkling tracks made of bubbly synth sounds and beats. After the opening track “Casper”, where he sings almost robot-like, the second track “No Prob” has an introspective tone. “We tried to run away before / it never worked / now you’ve locked the door,” he sings.

If this is dance music it also gets dreamy, like the world’s moving in slow motion. Take “Oils”, for example, which makes a modem noise pretty. Then there’s “100 Rooms”, a spoken travelogue with dance-floor beats and nice little keyboard melodies. Or “Believer”, which seems like both an adventure ride and a tech manifesto. It’s one beyond my luddite’s comprehension, but I understand the feeling behind a line like “Just a believer / so I recode / just a believer / so it fucks up.” Life’s all about trial and error and pushing on forward, right?

Kicking Gas for Laughs is an album with its own sound and a great feeling to it, a spirit of excitement. It’s also a loopier complement to Downey’s more restrained, but no worse, album Hold Horses, released earlier in the year. This album has seemingly more planned-out songwriting; it seems less like a lark, and is probably more likely to impress cynics with the lyrics or sound. Though the songwriting is more restrained, it has the same general style/perspective about it.

Hold Horses opens with what seems an especially personal look back at his times in Chicago, self-critically but also wistfully (he lives in Sweden now). The wistfulness is for friends, really – “all the boys and all their stereos”. The song has a synth-pop style and motion to it, fitting for both the looking-back and the optimistic tune itself. “Royalist” is a great dreamy look at another time and place: Stockholm. “These places and how I go”, he sings. The album has plenty of travel songs, place songs, love songs. “Location Is Nothing,” one song with cinematic hip-hop strings and a trip-hop pace is titled. Another song sums up travel like this: “spitting stars, kicking clouds, going home.”

Like Kicking Gas for Laughs, Hold Horses is driven by textures as much as melody and emotion. The atmosphere is pretty but also lonely, and it still rocks in its own way. I love “I See It Differently”, where there’s rock guitar but also synths, and it’s all been messed around with. That could be his credence perhaps. He’s always doing his own thing, without care for commerce even, which in music is always something to celebrate.

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