Dusty Limits

Life & I

July 26, 2018

Reviewed by Fiona Coffey for Cabaret Scenes

As the opening title track of Life & I heralds itself with a swift drum roll, it’s as if Dusty Limits and Michael Roulston know their listeners are in for a treat. And they are not wrong. This much-anticipated second album, following the critically acclaimed Grin (2015), is a supremely confident collection of meticulously crafted original songs. It positively crackles with the immediacy, spontaneity, and exuberance that characterize Limits the performer and the London neo-Weimar cabaret scene he and Roulston have been instrumental in creating. But this is also a mature, considered offering where beauty, magic, and musical and lyrical complexity lie comfortably alongside the free-spirited hilarity and rumbustiousness of the cabaret room and occasionally take us beyond it.

Limits’ capacity to mine themes of darkness, despair, and mortality and leaven them with acerbic wit has long been his calling card, and there is no better man for the job. But whereas the tone in Grin was predominantly melancholic, Life & I revisits Limits’ precarious and antipathetic relationship with life itself and finds new possibilities. The title-song opener includes his trademark witticisms (Morrisette may have rain on her wedding day, but Limits is run down by a hearse and chased by an emu—again) and finds its truth in the joyful stoicism of Roulston’s New Orleans jazz treatment. It’s hard to remain gloomy when you’re surrounded by a playful, uproarious eight-piece band, and Limits eventually concludes “Yes, Life and I, we’ll get along.
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This sets the stage for 12 additional numbers (plus a cheeky coda, “Narcissus” the so-called 13½th song), through which Limits and Roulston navigate an extraordinarily varied emotional and musical terrain. Following the opener, “Unter Den Linden,” is a witty, heartfelt beguine (“my heart felt big and light, like the Hindenberg/And every bit as likely to catch fire”). Utterly exquisite, beautifully arranged, it is an instant classic and could not be more different, musically or lyrically, from the song that follows: “Goya”—a passionate lyric inside a dramatic, almost cinematic soundscape, with shades of folk rock. The mood shifts again with “In Confidence,” a waspish comedy song in which Limits casts himself as the kindly but mischievous gay best friend. It delivers pure comic delight of the kind this duo do so well. (Most in the audience at the album launch were falling over with laughter.)

“The Clash of Civilisations” follows, a military-band style polemic against war, terrorism, and the parlous state of the world, written some 10 years ago but still resonant today. It’s another gear change, but Life & I’s running order has been judiciously chosen. Nothing jars; each song stands in its own space.
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The emotional twists and turns between as well as within songs keep the listener fully present and engaged, never quite knowing what is around the corner.

The elegiac “Heaven, Hell or Highgate” asks life’s big questions. It is a big song that showcases Limits’ vocal power and expressiveness, ending with a musical joke that adds a delightful ironic twist. This is followed by the quietly hymnal “My Dear Dead Lover,” the music seemingly betraying the emotion underneath the coldly unsentimental lyric. But Limits the clown is never off stage for very long. “A Lovely Day” is a hilarious, bawdy, knees-up in the music-hall tradition, the band’s backing vocals transporting us to a lads’ night out in the pub. And this is followed by the wickedly satirical “(Don’t) Help the Aged” with its astonishingly bold and funny lyric, encompassing not only the heartless treatment of the old but of the sick and homeless, too.

After a few sparse piano chords, the dream-like “Nightfall” leads us away, as if we have stepped outside onto a dark street to enjoy a solitary cigarette. With a more compressed lyric, Roulston’s music becomes foreground in this unexpected interlude—a beautiful melody with a haunting soprano saxophone solo.
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Then it’s back inside the cabaret room for more comedy mixed with social critique, this time targeting the absurdities of heterosexual lifestyles. “Polar Bear” explores the unregulated privilege of procreation, pointedly arranged as a country song, while “M.S.M,” an audience participation favorite with its chorus of male appendages, pulls apart the Kinsey No. 4s who identify as straight.

And before the final 13½th number, the album concludes with “High Heels by the Sink”—a gentle, guitar-led rumba that saves the most intimate disclosure for last. The absurdity and helplessness of the artist’s condition is offered without melodrama—just pure pain, coated in lightly self-deprecating humor that is both enchanting and poignant. “We’re artists, we live your dreams/No wonder we’re all going mad.”

It is a hugely rich and satisfying journey, with more layers and nuance revealed in each subsequent listening. In a randomized, Spotify-driven world, if there were ever a case for the continued existence of the carefully curated studio album designed to be enjoyed from start to finish, this is it.

Limits and Roulston are masters of the art of live cabaret. It is their passion, and yet they have fully embraced the opportunities afforded by a second studio project: new material, ambitious arrangements, and an eight-piece band that is wonderfully and instinctively attuned to their ideas. Everything—from the quality of the musicianship, to the skillful mixing, to the arresting cover artwork—speaks to the dedication Limits, Roulston, and their collaborators invest in their chosen craft. However, the duo have not sacrificed things that make live cabaret special: the raw intimacy, the absence of pretense, the heartfelt sharing of experience.

There is a genuineness about Life & I. In the sum of all its varied parts, it seems to be saying, “I’m alive, so are you, here we are together.” Limits and Roulston remind us that in any given moment, we have permission to rage against the machine or laugh and play; to enjoy a crude joke or be taken seriously; to rise above it all or feel overwhelmed with despair. Living the tension between joy and pain, hope and cynicism, rage and acceptance, love and solitude—isn’t that what life, as well as Life & I, is all about?

Life & I is available on https://michaelroulston.bandcamp.com/album/life-i

Dusty Limits and Michael Roulston appear Live at Zedel on September 12th and 14th. Tickets: https://www.brasseriezedel.com/live-at-zedel/heaven-or-hell-september-2018?date=149683901