Genre: Pop / Folk

01 Charlotte's Glass Eye
02 My God And My Dog
03 Bad Day Anyway
04 Gift
05 Stillborn (live)
06 Last Belch Of The Fish
07 It Was April
08 No Fun Anymore
09 There Is No Mud In Joyville
10 Soiled Bandages
11 The Oven
12 The 23 Definitions Of Love
13 Portrait Of Doktor Goebbels
14 The Little Dead Mermaid
15 Nativity Of Skulls
16 Got So Many Women
17 Stephanie, I Forgive You
18 Musket
19 Wotan Rains On A Plutocrat Parade
20 Document June 19, 1993
21 Horse Ambulance
22 Eddie Waitkus
23 Lost Yellow Mitten

Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter David E. Williams has been a cult figure in certain circles for years now, but it seems as if the appeal of his distinctively dark and acerbic take on human existence is finally widening. 2007 saw the release of a David E. Williams tribute album, The Appeal Of Discarded Orthodoxy, also on Old Europa Café, to which a wide variety of neo-folk and industrial artists contributed their own renditions of Williams compositions, and for those who were introduced to Williams’ work through this compilation, Pseudo Erotica And Beyond is a logical next step in discovering the work of the man himself. The original Pseudo Erotica EP was Williams’ first ever release, appearing as a 12” vinyl EP on Red Dog Records way back in 1987, and this CD release includes the four tracks of the original release, plus a whopping 19 further tracks – all of them previously unreleased, so even dedicated fans who already own the two albums and two EPs that Williams has released since the original version of Pseudo Erotica will want this new edition.

David E. Williams is the Noel Coward of Generation X, belonging squarely in the American gothic lineage of such figures as Edward Gorey, Diane Arbus, John Waters, David Lynch, Charles Addams and Charles Burns. His blackly humorous songs brim with absurdist, deadpan, gleefully grotesque vignettes of perverts, criminals, misfits, loners, losers and abusers. ‘Charlotte's Glass Eye’, the opening track of Pseudo Erotica, is a good example. Charlotte is a devout young girl, who’s crushed beneath a falling statue whilst praying in a cemetery. Her body is discovered by Fred, a sexual deviant who’s also in the cemetery, and he steals her glass eye, “’cause that’s the kind of thing he likes to save.” Years later, Fred dies in a car wreck – his body is identified by the glass eye, which he’s wearing around his neck. “Bye bye Charlotte. Bye bye Fred.” What are we to make of this story? It’s lurid, sick, pointless – and hilarious. ‘Bad Day Anyway’ is, if anything, even worse. A retarded girl is sent to the garden centre by her father to buy “some seeds and things”. The sales clerk sexually exploits her. She returns home, “sweat on her brow and blood in her underwear”. Her father, in a drunken rage, beats her to death for forgetting to buy his seeds. The punchline? “For her, it turned out to be a bad day anyway.”

There are certain recurrent themes in Williams’ lyrics. Sexual deviation and violent death. Freaks and deformities. Pitifully thwarted desires and ambitions – these are not so much torch songs as blowtorch songs. And an unhealthy obsession with the evil doings of the Third Reich – this particular strand in Williams’ writing reaches a climax on the grandiloquently apocalyptic production number 'Wotan Rains On A Plutocrat Parade', which is filled with demented white supremacist ravings, redeemed only by a crucial figleaf of irony. Neglected genius or sick puppy? David E. Williams is both. Other songs on Pseudo Erotica include ‘Soiled Bandages’, ‘The Little Dead Mermaid’ (the only song here not penned by Williams) and ‘Nativity Of Skulls’ – these titles alone are titillating and provocative enough, without any further need to delve into the murky depths of their narrative content.

The majority of the songs on Pseudo Erotica are home recordings or live tracks, which in itself is indicative of how unjustly ignored Williams’ music has been. Most songs feature only Williams singing and accompanying himself on keyboards, though there are several songs recorded with guest musicians, such as 'Wotan Rains On A Plutocrat Parade' and, perhaps most distinctively, ‘Stephanie, I Forgive You’, which has a chamber music arrangement with violin, viola and cello.

A lot of CDs come with lyric booklets, but all too rarely do they make for such a rewarding read as Pseudo Erotica. Indeed, Williams’ lyrics are very entertaining in their own right – you don’t even need to listen to the songs to appreciate and enjoy these neat little prose poems and twisted parables. It seems somehow significant that the lyrics are typeset as prose, rather than poetry. The lines rhyme, but that doesn’t really seem so important. What carries these songs along is their strong narratives and unforgettable characters, not their poetic elegance.

Salvador Dalí once famously remarked of himself, “The only difference between Salvador Dalí and a madman is that I am not mad.” It’s tempting to make a similar comparison between David E. Williams and ‘outsider’ songwriters such as Daniel Johnston – Williams is just as out there, just as weird, he’s just not quite so obviously deranged. If Williams’ chosen subject matter were less relentlessly offensive, less iredeemably bent, he’d probably be feted as a great singer-songwriter, along the lines of Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits or Jarvis Cocker. As it is, it’s really a matter of personal taste as to whether you find Williams’ personal brand of alienation in tune with your own. Myself, I got along with this album well enough to listen to all of it three times in a row on the very day it arrived. And should it so happen that you find the work of David E. Williams to be to your taste as well, you can relax, sit back and enjoy these tragi-comic, tainted truffles, revelling in your own elitism, smug in the certainty that you’re imbibing some great art that the vast majority of your fellow humanoids are never, ever going to get.