I went with a black woman, perhaps the only one in the room. A preppy couple was next to us on the standing-room-only floor, not quite sure what they had gotten themselves into. The woman appeared a bit frightened by the biker jackets and piercings, but when the lights went down and five guys in black suits appeared on stage, a rush of thumping house beats flooded the speakers, and the differences were quickly forgotten. Likewise, when the guitars came charging in. Morel shatters boundaries, appealing to both the dance music and gay undergrounds, as well as the hipster and indie rock contingents.
For the next hour, ringleader and vocalist Richard Morel and cohorts (guitarist John Allen, drummer Rob Black, bassist Pat Flood and percussionist Dwayne Tyree) would pogo between an uplifting night at the club and a post-punk shower of aggression, sometimes effortlessly combining the two. It mirrored the stylistic divide-but ultimate cohesion-of "Lucky Strike."
"Some of the stuff is very much on a house tip, and some of the stuff is very much on a rock tip, and it's always important to me to have continuity on the album to make it work as one piece," Morel said a few weeks earlier at his recording studio in the quiet DC suburb of Takoma Park, MD. (It is also the expansive, soundproofed basement of his home.)
"Two things make that happen: one is consciously when I'm producing, even when I'm producing the rock stuff, I'm keeping in mind what it's sitting with," Morel continued. "The other thing is the selection of songs. Although there may have been some songs that I wanted to put on that record, they wouldn't have worked with those other songs."
Occasionally, the different styles all work within the frame of a single composition. "Cheerful" is a multilayered exercise in dichotomy. Soothing strings and ambient textures effect a dreamy vibe before Morel dives headfirst into raging breakbeats and amped-up synths. Certain tracks, like the album's seething first single "If You Love Me," display a more simplistic, straight-ahead lyrical rawness. Morel said there are distinct differences in the compositional approach to each type of song.
"Sometimes if it's a more electronic, weird, sort of DJ thing, it happens collaborating with the computer, and sort of vibing on loops and keyboards, and just sort of accidentally stumbling on it, like, 'oh, that's a phat thing that's happening there,'" he explained. "Then I'll write a song on top of that, and the other way is just simply writing at the piano or writing at the guitar. Those are the two different ways, and you can kind of tell by listening to the songs which ones came which way."
The fortysomething Morel is most famous nationally and beyond as a house music producer and remixer. He became friends with international house superstars and DC residents Deep Dish in the early '90s, and he was soon releasing tracks on Yoshitoshi, the duo's label. Yoshitoshi released Morel's "Queen of the Highway" album in 2001, which featured the international club hits "True (The Faggot Is You)" and "Funny Car."
