Maps We Can Create
James Chapman sits in his bedroom like any other frustrated young person, but where most young lads might keep a computer and a television, Chapman put his 16-track tape recorder and began recording an album that sounds as if it came not from his Northamptonshire, UK bedroom but from the outer reaches of space. The airy, synthetic, dreamlike schisms shimmer like so much Grandaddy. But where Modesto, Cali’s most forward thinking group always rooted themselves in the desert, Chapman uses his British citizenship to assert his own idea of “roots music,” if you can imagine My Bloody Valentine and Stone Roses as being rooted. “You Don’t Know Her Name” and “Elouise” traverse time and space with the misty-morning fog of keyboards and reverb in an open field and a ton of Trembling Blue Stars / Mojave 3 melancholy. Conceivably, Chapman will never get out of his bedroom alive.
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