Captain Emo

Seaworthy: Daniel Smith of Danielson. Photo Christiaan Palladino. Courtesy Sounds Familyre.

I always thought of Mrs. Van Soelen, my junior school music teacher in Johannesburg, South Africa, as a big, blond bird of prey. She sat perched upright on her piano stool, hammering away on the keyboard with her red-tipped talons, one raptor eye on the sheet music, the other on the lookout for reprobates. She was a devout member of South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church, an unforgiving Calvinist sect. The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus Loves Me, All Things Bright and Beautiful (my personal favourite) — they all became dirges.

This is how it goes for some of us: sitting through a liturgical proceeding at a young age inspires distaste for anything vaguely devout and a knee-jerk attraction to the musically godless (my very complete Iron Maiden collection attests to this). To their credit, Christian bards figured this out some time ago. The ’80s and ’90s saw an explosion in contemporary religious music, from hardcore to country to sugar-punk to hip-hop — in all, a $1-billion-a-year industry, much of it dominated by the major labels.

Jesus Christ has been thoroughly co-opted, and his name sells records and concert tickets by the truckload. Christian ditties exist in a parallel pop universe that secular listeners largely ignore. But over the last few years, there has been renewed interest in sacred song, and the obvious winner is the spiritual, that age-old expression of deep religious and emotional feeling.

If there is a band that embodies this revival, it’s Camden, New Jersey’s Danielson. Their music is the perfect representation of the New Spiritual — often difficult, always thoughtful, consistently prayerful. It has something that, to modern ears, sounds fresh: sincerity. Stripped of cynicism and studded with nuggets of genuine worship and praise, the spiritual can be an uplifting, moving experience in a culture that often seems bereft of authenticity. It hits a chord many of us didn’t know existed. It fills a void we didn’t know we had.

Courtesy Sonic Unyon Records.

Anchored by Daniel Smith — who assembled the band as his thesis project at Rutgers University — Danielson is a sprawling affiliation of (mostly) siblings who have been making astounding indie music for six years. The group’s fan club includes cultural kingmakers like author Rick Moody, indie website Pitchforkmedia and everyone at McSweeneys, yet the band remains on the fringes. Their staggering new album, Ships, is one of this year’s musical triumphs — a touchstone like Arcade Fire’s Funeral that deserves to find a wider audience.

Danielson’s moniker changes with each album — the band has been called, variously, Danielson Family, Danielson Famile and Brother Danielson. For this iteration, Smith has corralled, along with his brothers and sisters, a host of fellow indie stars to pray along with him — including Sufjan Stevens, whose Illinois was the consensus pick for best album of 2005. Smith and Stevens are opposite ends of what could be described as a mini-movement — their worship music has found an audience in clubs, concert halls, music festivals and other venues where God rarely makes an appearance.

When I recently spoke to the guardedly genial Smith over the phone, he was surprisingly unabashed about his religiosity. The title Ships, he tells me, has a double meaning. “We’re all in this ship together, and we as individuals are ships — we’re spiritual vessels — so we’re containers within containers.” The word also refers to the suffix “that turns the word into something better than it is”: friendship, kinship, relationship.

On the new album, Smith and his acolytes have created 11 tracks of unashamedly discordant, splendidly ebullient spiritual music that won’t be in rotation at a mega-church near you. Because the album deals with faith in a complicated way, the songs come in many forms: sweet odes to the Almighty, complicated parlour pieces, freaky folk tunes and pure Gospel revivalism. Ships reinvents how music can speak to God.

On the standout track, My Lion Sleeps Tonight, Smith sings:

My stomach is filled with pig pods
No longer worthy to be called your son
But Pappa runs to me
And his arms
Around me does throw

There are dozens of lyrical allusions to “Pappa.” Finding the religious references in Smith’s lyrics can be something of a sport; he cannot be accused of literalism. His voice alternates between a warm, inoffensive warble and a harsh, childish squawk. Given that he occasionally conjures Geddy Lee from Rush, Danielson’s music has a prog-rock element that you won’t find in your Grandma’s hymns. Smith is accompanied by what sounds like an orchestra of instruments salvaged from a hobo hootenanny: horns, cymbals, triangles, violins, guitars. They’re grounded by a rollicking, wall-of-thunder roar of percussion that keeps everything rooted firmly in the realm of psychedelic rock.

One for all and all for fun: The Smith siblings in Danielson. From left: Daniel, David, Jedidiah, Chris and Megan. Photo Stephanie Black. Courtesy Sounds Familyre.

This sense of playfulness, of meanings within meanings, infuses Danielson’s songs with an (often obtuse) allegorical significance. Why, I wonder, does Jesus (or is it God?) have to be Pappa? Is this canny avoidance of the overtly religious meant to keep from alienating the decidedly secular indie crowd?

According to Smith, it isn’t conscious. “I like puzzles — I like things that I can unravel,” he says.

This childlike quality of play is central to Smith’s music. “It’s based on my obsession with Christ’s teachings — that we must become like a little child to enter the Kingdom of God,” he tells me. Smith and his siblings grew up in a household where their father, Lenny, would lead them in group devotionals. (An accomplished religious musician in his own right, Lenny Smith’s hymnal Our God Reigns was blasted from the Popemobile when John Paul II visited America in ’99.) They would use homemade instruments pulled from an overflowing tickle trunk; Danielson Famile’s 2001 album Fetch The Compass Kids is the purest manifestation of this slapdash DIY ethos. The search for what Smith terms “childlikeness” — distinct from childishness — hints at the ecstatic naiveté of some outsider art and the disturbing perkiness of caffeinated kiddie shows, but also the search for the inner child so prevalent in the avant-garde. “Every child is an artist,” Picasso once said. “The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

Channelling the inner child means that Danielson can seem annoyingly insular, and, occasionally, creepy. Perhaps that’s the price of abandoning adult restraint and submitting to exultation. But if prayer is an individual pursuit, it’s also a community activity. And when Danielson is at its best, the band brings you gloriously into the fold.

Danielson accesses an ancient type of spirituality rooted firmly in the American ecstatic tradition — a specific form of religious abandon that hints at the rapture of a gospel singalong, or the exhortations of an evangelical preacher man. Smith makes us see that even if we don’t happen to subscribe to any religious designation, we are a community of people and that we all need a connection to something authentic. With the maniacal warble, the childlike screeches, the cymbal clashes and the thundering drums, Smith shocks awake our inner kid, and reminds us to say “thank you.” He reminds us to play.

Play, it can be argued, is often missing from organized religion. With this in mind, I can’t help wondering whether Mrs. Van Soelen would’ve added anything from Ships to her lugubrious repertoire. Perched straight-backed in front of her piano, I doubt even she would find it possible to make a dirge from the music of Danielson.

Richard Poplak is a Toronto-based writer.

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