Before the release of SFA’s monumental tenth studio album, Rhys has unveiled his third solo album, Hotel Shampoo, and it’s full of gorgeously eccentric pop gems. The light-hearted title references Rhys’ long-time touring habit of hoarding mini shampoo bottles and various complimentary hotel products. The release of Hotel Shampoo also inspired him to create an art installation of a miniature hotel constructed from his collection of products. For Rhys, the project not only illustrated his transient existence and the nomadic life of a musician but served as a solemn monument to the waste that’s produced in our disposable age.
Hotel Shampoo opens with Shark Ridden Waters – a cinematic, baroque-pop composition that’s accompanied fittingly by a Peter Gray-directed, Godard-inspired Mediterranean narrative-driven video revolving around a young man distracted by his attachment to social networking. Honey All Over is unabashedly camp, swooning keys-laden balladry laced in wit and classic pop nuances, but the gorgeous ballads of At The Heart Of Love and If We Were Words (We Would Rhyme) prove more poignant.
Sensations In The Dark may be underlined by similarly groove-laden piano, but its Mariachi-tinged, horn-ridden chamber pop splendour renders the track outstanding and a clear highlight.
The horn and string-laden Take A Sentence is the album’s most gracefully-articulated composition and one that’s brimming in pop classicism, orchestral beauty and remarkable poise. Rhys also has a unique way of slipping serious subject matters into irresistible, quirky art-pop songs as demonstrated by the eco-politics covered on Conservation Conversation, colonisation in Christopher Columbus and inequality in Patterns Of Power. Rhys is never short of fresh ideas and as exemplified by Hotel Shampoo, he’s one of the most reliably intriguing purveyors of charmingly peculiar, multi-coloured experimental-pop.
