Sheer Golden Hooks

Sheer Golden Hooks is the solo debut album from Jeffrey Clark, the former lead singer/songwriter of Los Angeles band Shiva Burlesque, (who released two highly acclaimed albums in the late '80's, before mutating into indy rock greats Grant Lee Buffalo.) The album features beautiful, letter-press printed cardboard packaging designed by Bruce Licher of Independent Projects Press. Each CD package is a numbered, limited edition item, and contains a newsprint lyric sheet/poster insert designed by Jeffrey Clark. Andrew Perry of England's Select Magazine descibed Clark's songwriting as 'truly lyrical... self exploratory... these are the closest you'll get to poetic words integrated into the rock idiom.' Jeffrey Clark's unique, poetic vision shines in this collection of recordings from 1991-1995; ranging from an early, garagey, Scott Walker-style pop sound, with lush string arrangements (via ex-Shiva cellist Greg Adamson), through the somewhat brooding and psychedelic guitar-based songs of the mid-period (recorded with Pascal Humbert, later of 16 Horsepower), and ending with prose and stories set to improvised music (again working with Humbert). Robert Wilonksy of New Times (Los Angeles) writes: '... (Jeffrey Clark) knows how to wrap his words in gorgeous and fragile instrumentation that evokes the desert plains and the concrete sprawl... verse and chorus usually overlap in these beautiful and subversive 'pop' arrangements... a thousand beautiful puzzle pieces connected at random and at will.' 'I like to think of what I do as protest music in an odd way, like sensual protest music,' Clark says, 'I think the way to unhinge the people who want to turn the world into a TV commercial is to see more deeply, connect more, feel more... '