DYNAMO: glistening eclectic orchestral pop in the melodic tradition of easy, instinctive composition.
D Frahier, aka E-Grand, forged his creativity in the indie pop-rock movement of the ‘90s. He is a writer and composer whose natural reserve bubbles over in the creation of a universe where his ambivalent sensitivity, experience and fertile fever tangle up together into the Dynamo brand. In the spirit of pop’s modern day heros – whose greatness is their simplicity and whose pride is free of overweening arrogance – his only arms are his taste for adversity, his solid achorage in the everyday life that is all of ours, and an idealistic realism which, in its ordinary transparency, enables him to make out what may yet be the better paths of a golden future. Worth trying for!
Fleeing any little labeled boxes, Dynamo stands as a masterly, inexhaustible source drawing on the ardor of guitars and the melancholy of harmony. With sometimes a lyrically plaintive despair, sometimes an outrageously inciscive efficiency, the repertoire oscillates between depressurized interstellar wailing and invigorating freshness, between vibrant road-ballad emotion and sonatas dripping with mind-storming electrified dynamo-ism, raptured in jubilation.
This first album – recorded in the Gramophone studios in Lyon, France, produced by two of the group’s members, and mastered at Townhouse, London – is a true masterstroke. Conceived by the recombination of all of the possible variations on a personal musical signature, Elsewhere’s authenticity is drawn from the wellsprings of pop, vintage rock and electric folk music. The living proof of whetstone-pure song-writing, with a profusion of guitar voices sealed together in impeccable arrangements, this first corpus derives its emotional charge from the glamour of languorous solos, the impetuousness of twisted chords, and the sparkle of sound.
Reciting dreamworld scenes of life, singer E-Grand’s high-speech inflexions carry us into the gloomy world of the Drifters, where ideals run up against leaden reality, and, all too often, throbbing nostalgia stands in the way of any view of the future. Yet, when luck is out and sorrow looms, the soul in its grief (which it was not born to remain in) reacts by a spontaneous enhancement of its virginal light-heartedness, and a searing romantic yearning.