PRE-ORDER - OUT 10TH JULY: edition of 200
A long time ago, during the messy death rattle of guitar music in the early 21st c., the NME once declared a young Conor Kiley “the future of rock and roll”. The hyperbole of this statement has proven unsurprisingly ironic; not because Kiley remains an obscure artist, but that now, nearly two decades on, it's obvious that rock never had the future the journalists and industry bigwigs of the late aughts had deluded themselves into thinking it did. So, what happened to all those promising young talents raised on rock dreams? With ample time and perspective, it seems that removing the aspirational carrot from those who came of age thinking they could have careers like Oasis or GNR has meant those same talents have ultimately matured into far stranger, more complex and subtle artists. For Kiley, this has meant evolving into a songwriter and recording artist who has repeatedly broken, rebuilt, and reimagined the prodigious gifts he started with into something refined, honest, and singular. He’s an alchemist; as interested in the ugly and crude DNA gurgling beneath the lids of all beautiful records as he is the witchcraft that can turn that same ugliness into beauty. This record takes its name from a historic building in the Seattle neighbourhood of Pioneer Square. Built in 1914, it began as a haven of ill repute for shore-leave hooligans before improbably becoming a landmark venue during the grunge years of the 1980s. Eventually it fell derelict and was subsequently refurbished as low-income accommodations for artists. Kiley lived here from 2011 to 2015 and made this record at home in that time. It is a deeply personal and diaristic album which takes a couple of key pieces as sacred texts; the post-structuralist blues of Hagerty and Herema, the pulpy romance of Sudden and Kusworth, and the ever-so-slightly more high-brow junkie bardism of Fred Neil, Tim Hardin, or Tim Buckley. It features some of his finest and most nakedly rendered compositions. Yet it's also shot through with a wild spirit of experimentation. There are repeating intercalary blasts of thematic noise. There are covert recordings of blurry and touching interchanges between both friends and strangers. All of which is further scaffolded with telling renditions of tunes you may already know well. Taken in the aggregate, Ok Hotel plays like a recording that was made in secret by someone you love; a work so vulnerable it needed some time to meet its audience. Fortunately for us, that time is now.
