Release No. Two on Monk's Hood plays well to label co-founder Sterling Mackinnon's clear long-standing interest in off-kilter psychedelia. Conor Kiley is a former collaborator of Mackinnon's (check out in particular the short-lived but vastly underrated Broken Nobles), and has a notable history of partially-famed musical output that stems back to the earlier parts of this century. OK Hotel, named after a Seattle building of unusual creative lineage in which Kiley lived whilst recording the album, arrives after all that but is certainly not new, more a lost archival piece from 2011-15 rescued from the recesses by a spirited fan. It's the kind of music that fits such origins, a collection of lo-fi rendered, psych-folk digressions suggestive of a mysterious internal life that could easily be lost to time and/or circumstance - like, maybe, F.J. McMahon, Fred Neil or Jim Sullivan before him. Indeed, if you were to discover Kiley one day went ghost hunting and never returned, you'd have an appropriate document that mapped out the legend. Moreover - and I am loathe to use the word and apologise profusely - there is something timeless (or out of time) to these songs that adds a further level of intrigue to the whole affair, the sense that they could have been recorded just yesterday or so very long ago, either somewhere along the lost highway of America or in a bedsit off the King's Rd here in London. There's a song here called 'Camden Town' that not only bears close resemblance to the flophouse romance of Nikki Sudden and Dave Kusworth, but also makes twin towns of the place and a space like the OK Hotel, where itinerance, late night 'activity' and creative enquiry can circulate in strange union. Kiley's songwriting is classic and focused, but there's also a compelling dose of subtle experimentation dwelling beneath the surface that displays the kind of free-form, dysfunctional attitude to rock n roll convention that we might also associate with Royal Trux or Jim Shepard, albeit couched in a bohemian carefree-ness that's far more West Coast coded. The album closes with a cover of Jackson C Frank's 'Blues Run the Game', a perfect final confirmation of OK Hotel's own lore - like Frank, Riley was lost and then he was found: "maybe tomorrow honey, some place down the line, I'll wake up older". Older now yes, but also new again.
FFO: F.J. McMahon, Fred Neil. Nikki Sudden, Royal Trux, Jim Shepard
