Delicate Steve - Positive Force

The first time I heard any of this music, Steve was giving me a lift home after a Nat Baldwin show. We were going up Allen Street in Manhattan, and I’d finally convinced him to play me something from the new album. “This is going to be the last song,” he said, and put on “Luna.” OK, maybe I’d had a couple of beers, but in the dark of night the lights of passing cars and neon signs glowed molten and forlorn just like Steve’s guitar, and there was a serene space in the music as if it were the eye of a storm. It was one of those times when surroundings, moment and music combine to make a powerful impression. I’ll always remember it.

And that’s a big part of Delicate Steve – the mystical synergy that music can have with life. It’s why the new album is called Positive Force. “I want to put out a positive feeling,” says Steve. “It’s so much more fun to get people all excited and uplifted.”

And like its predecessor, 2010’s also aptly titled Wondervisions, Positive Force really is uplifting, straight outta the idyllic, tree-lined streets of Steve’s hometown of Fredon, deep in rural New Jersey, where he wrote and recorded this album. (Listen closely and you can hear the local crickets in a couple of songs.) Maybe it’s a little more burnished, leisurely and cunningly layered this time, but there’s still that winsome Delicate Steve charm, by turns tender and triumphant, of songs like “Big Time Receiver” or “Afria Talks to You.” These are eleven soulful, unabashedly heartfelt variations on the theme of joie de vivre, and each of them is kind of irresistible.

Steve not only played all the instruments on the album – very much including the lyrical and virtuosic guitar that defines the album – but he recorded the entire thing, and mixed it too. And that’s all very impressive, but the thing to remember is, Steve is first and foremost a songwriter. His compositions have verses and choruses and sometimes even bridges. It’s just that he doesn’t happen to be a vocalist. So he gets his guitar to do that. That’s why, funnily and miraculously enough, this is instrumental music you can sing along to.

Actually, a few songs do have vocals – besides “Two Lovers,” there’s “Big Time Receiver,” “Touch,” and “Redeemer.” (Steve sings, joined occasionally by Christian Peslak and Mickey Sanchez from the crackerjack Delicate Steve live band) And even then, the human voice is just another instrument. “As guitar-driven as this album might be,” Steve says, “I didn’t want it to feel like an instrumental record. I wanted it to have a more encompassing thing, so it couldn’t be called instrumental.” So Steve calls it wordless music.

But where on earth does this wordless music come from? Steve says the inspirations for Positive Force included a bunch of classic rock, like Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and the Kinks. You can hear the Beach Boys in “Love,” the title of “Afria Talks to You” is a deliberately misspelled reference to Sly Stone, the guitar playing on “Tallest Heights” is Steve’s tribute to Michael Jackson’s vocal style, and “Luna” is a tribute to Miles Davis. Steve’s ultra-expressive, melodic slide work hails back to Derek & the Dominos and George Harrison, and I hear some serious proto-Delicate Steve in Santana’s sublime “Samba Pa Ti,” not to mention various Afro-pop and all reggae’s sunsplashed variations.

But there’s a futuristic gleam to Delicate Steve that deletes all comparison to just about anything except maybe contemporaries like Yeasayer, Ratatat and the late, great Ponytail. Yeasayer’s Anand Wilder, a big Delicate Steve fan, said the music reminded him of early ’80s stuff by French-Beninese musician Wally Badarou, who also made bright, upbeat music drenched in ecstatic sunshine. (That explains the title of “Wally Wilder.”)

You might notice the hot licks all over Positive Force. Or you might not, since they’re so tastefully deployed. That’s a big reason why Steve has become a go-to guitarist in the New York-area underground. One night in December last year, he played at downtown NYC avant music club the Stone with a riveting side project by Anand Wilder – and he was so great that the next band, which featured members of Javelin, Man Man and Cibo Matto, asked him to sit in. In 2011, he did an exquisite collaborative single with the great Brooklyn band Callers, sat in with Nat Baldwin from Dirty Projectors, Akron/Family, Fang Island, Janka Nabay, Yellow Ostrich and Ra Ra Riot, and that May, the Delicate Steve live band backed up Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo and Les Savy Fav’s Tim Harrington on some smokin’ Minutemen covers at yours truly’s Our Band Could Be Your Life tribute concert in New York.

All this stuff happens not just because Steve is a splendid musician but because he and his music exude what we call in the business “a good vibe.” That feeling permeates every nook and cranny of this record. In a world that does its level best to validate every bitter, cynical thought you’ve ever had, Positive Force is, in its own delightful way, provocative – it challenges you to accept unqualified sweetness and warmheartedness. “The world is already so full of stuff,” Steve observes. “So if you’re going to put something in, why not make it something good, instead of adding more negativity. That’s part of the mission statement.”