Sometimes musical circles take decades to close. Just ask Fleur De Lys and their catchy cover of The Who’s '60s freakbeat rarity, "Circles." For those of us digging through dusty crates at the margins of post-punk, a first introduction to mid-century mystic Eden Ahbez didn't come from a Nat King Cole hit. It came straight from the liner notes of David J’s excellent 1990 solo album, Songs From Another Season, which featured a stark cover of "Nature Boy." Landing a copy of the newly unearthed Eden Ahbez masterpiece Dharmaland right alongside David J's latest offering, Tracks From the Attic Revisited, feels like a strange bit of cosmic timing—like when planets collide, creating a catastrophic event altering both worlds. Both records are acts of archival excavation, perhaps as musically important as Dr. Zahi Hawass’s Egyptian digs. But where Dharmaland fills in a lost, treasured history, Revisited finds an artist actively collaborating with his own lingering ghost.
When Independent Project Records dropped the massive triple-LP box set Tracks From the Attic, those 37 low-fidelity home recordings felt like an overwhelming historical text of biblical proportions. Sound the trumpets and hark the angels. Captured on four-track cassettes between 1984 and 2004, they were essential listening for die-hard, curious Gothic Bat worshippers. Still, the immediate consensus among critics was that a tight, definitive solo record was buried somewhere beneath all that tape-hissing snake.
Revisited proves that theory right. David J cherry-picked ten of those bedroom sketches. The flesh of a cherry is delectable to consume, but the pit carries a deadly cyanide; J took these tracks to Ear Gallery Music in Los Angeles and handed them over to a heavy-duty live studio band featuring guitarist Jason Roberts (Spoon) and drummer David Raven (Keith Richards). They recorded everything live with zero rehearsals over a brisk five days. J approached his past material objectively, treating the tracks as if they were sent to him by a total stranger for a production job. In fact, he was chasing an apparition from his past, conjuring up a poltergeist desperate to have his story heard.
To see why this works, you have to look at David J as a lifelong cultural sponge—a trait he shares with chameleons like the ever-changing David Bowie. J’s creative footprint is dictated by what he consumes, driven by a near-religious devotion to physical vinyl and an open-channel approach to art. In interviews, he describes songwriting not as a deliberate construction, but as a "beautiful fever" that seizes him into a trance. He is less a traditional composer and more of an esoteric medium or dedicated spiritualist. This is, after all, a man who formed the obscure Sinister Ducks with graphic novelist Alan Moore, wrote the companion soundtrack to V for Vendetta, and spent years practicing ceremonial occult magic until the intensity forced him to bury his ritual dagger deep in the California desert—only to find the saved reference images wiped clean from his hard drive when he arrived home.
You can hear every single one of those heavy record boxes opening up on Revisited, with wafts of dust filling the night air. His minimalist, room-shaking bass style—originally born from sneaking into working-class British skinhead clubs to absorb vintage Jamaican ska and roots reggae—gives these resurrected tracks a visceral spine from C1 to C7. These songs were originally shelved because J's prolific output during his Love and Rockets years meant yesterday's recording was instantly eclipsed by today's idea. An artist always loves their newest creation. Hearing them fully fleshed out now reveals that several carry the unmistakable DNA of songs that easily could have been central pillars for Love and Rockets.
The transformations are immediate. Where “I Wish Those Spacemen Would Come” was once a naive bedroom demo, this version carries a weary, cosmic floating weight. J even updates the text for our fragile presence, swapping a dated reference to Ronald Reagan out for a biting verse on a modern conman crowned king by tech bros and oligarchs—a sharp bit of protest that mirrors his live covers of John Lennon’s “Gimme Some Truth.”
The live room completely changes the material. “If Muzak Be the Junk Food of Love” swings with a late-'70s New Wave swagger that owes a massive debt to the sharp pub-rock punch of Wilko Johnson, the "Human Rubberman" of Dr. Feelgood fame. Meanwhile, the album closer “Punishment By Roses” catches an unpolished, gritty spoken realism akin to Charles Bukowski—the visceral drunk so easily romanticized by pop culture. Those are two massive influences J highlighted during his appearance on Amoeba's What's In My Bag?.
Meticulously captured by engineer Tony Green and mastered by Warren Defever (His Name Is Alive) at Third Man, the record carries a rich, analog warmth. For David J, the gloom of post-punk was never a permanent destination to the stars, but rather a necessary passage toward transcendental meditation—a way to break on through to the other side, into the light. Go to the light, David J. Housed in Bruce Licher’s signature hand-letterpress packaging, Revisited does exactly that. By pulling these songs out of the dark of his dank storage room, he didn't just preserve his past—he gave it cardiopulmonary resuscitation and an essential second life force. It's a vital, living bridge to his next chapter: an upcoming autumn double-solo album tracking a 23-piece orchestra recorded in Prague.
Stay tuned, spacemen.
