I first heard Shelleyan Orphan on MTVs 120 Minutes with “Southern Bess [A Field Holler]”and was immediately smitten with the bucolic Chamber Pop music the duo of Jemaur Tayle and Caroline Crawley were crafting. I loved the interplay of his fey vocals adding a mirror like undercurrent to her glorious leads. I was all in for the first three Shelleyan Orphan albums, where the duo came off like the Folk Music version of Cocteau Twins using only 19th century technology like cellos, bassoons and clarinet. And if you’re in the mood for hearing some cor angalais, brother were they the band for you!

Their second album caught the attention of Robert Smith and suddenly Porl Thompson and Boris Williams were working side gigs in Shelleyan Orphan beginning with their “Century Flower” album of 1989. The band were picked by Smith to open the Cure’s “Disintegration” tour of America but I wasn’t so lucky. I never got to see them on that tour [we got Cranes, I think…]. Alas, after 1992’s “Humroot” the band seemed to disappear. I did not hear of them again until 2016 when Caroline Crawley died.

I hadn’t heard Babacar, the band that Crawley and Tayle formed with longtime cohorts Boris Williams and Porl Thompson in 1997. Nor had I heard that they had reformed in 2008 for a final and fourth Shelleyan Orphan album that I was blithely unaware of, “We Have Everything We Need.” I’ve not heard a note from this scarce disc yet. After some years of quiet time, Tayle had returned to writing music again after Crawley’s death in 2016, and naturally turned to Williams for a drumming in his new project Vamberator. Let us dig the new breed!

Vamberator: Sleep the Giant Of Sleeps – UK – DL [2024]

1. Sleep The Giant Of Sleeps 5:01

A throbbing bass line overlaid with a pulsating synth loop imparted a wacky, freewheeling energy immediately to “Sleep The Giant Of Sleeps.” Distorted guitar let us know instantly that the project would not be parked in 1868, though the live Archemia string quartet and a banjo plucking away deep in the mix revealed the only throwbacks here to the Shelleyan Orphan sound.

When Jemaur Tayle made his appearance, his vocal was decidedly deeper that I’d heard half a lifetime ago and touched with a hint of distortion effects that burnished the eccentric, extroverted vibe that he was now exploring. This was decidedly different as the full-bodied if not actually bloody Pop Music far removed from the effete stylings of Shelleyan Orphan.

Jemaur Tayle’s reinvention of himself as Vamberator might not be a sheerly radical as what Tom Waits accomplished with the leap from the Asylum Records era to “Swordfish Trombones” but it may be the next closest thing. As it is, I can hardly wait for the “Age Of Lonliness” album yet to come, but for now the single is available in the Bandcamp Vamberator store. Vamberator is highly recommended to any Shelleyan Orphan or Cure fans looking for a fix of outrageous Pop that is free to plow its own peculiar furrow. DJ, hit that button!

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