Unclever

Unclever is the new album by The Keith John Adams. It was recorded in 2006/2007 at Bel Air studios in Athens, Georgia. Jason NeSmith produced and played drums, while Kay Stanton played bass. KJA played guitars and sung. Unclever is his most rocking record to date, following the pop of 2005's Pip and the alt-folk of 2002's Sunshine Loft. Its band sound is the outcome of KJA touring the US for two months with NeSmith and Stanton backing him, following a month of dates in Japan with Tokyo's Elekibass doing the same. All those shows gave Keith's new songs an urgency and accessibility that's obvious from Unclever's first spin. The bandness of the album also led to the addition of the The. Last year saw KJA's third US tour in as many years, and his most thorough, taking him for the first time around the whole country, clocking up more than ten thousand miles. It ended with a great gig at the CMJ festival in New York in November. Keith's Athens connection was fostered by local label Happy Happy Birthday To Me, which released Pip in 2005. It's through HHBTM that Keith met producer NeSmith, whose band Casper and the Cookies has also had releases on the label and with whom KJA has now toured twice. It was also HHBTM label-mates Elekibass, that took Keith to Japan last summer. The Japanese response to KJA was 'a miracle' according to his backing band, helped in part by three specially written, but very simple, Japanese songs. The live KJA experience has recently been a mixture of Keith's solo acoustic songs (roaming the crowd, assaulting the audience), his garage rock numbers (stalking the stage like Chuck Berry's long-lost son) and a few of his trademark toy-piano songs. KJA has been ploughing the solo furrow since 2001, when his debut 7 came out on Flitwick Records in the UK. Playing solo has honed KJA's performance and songwriting skills, but an infatuation with some early rock'n'roll led to the formation of a trio in 2005 to plug into some of that primal energy. Before his solo adventures, Keith was the force behind Zuno Men, a band dubbed 'Art-Skiffle' by the British music press in the late 1990s. Its greatest success was a single of the week on the national BBC Mark Radcliffe radio show. The band went through several guises, two albums and several European tours, but drifted apart pre-millennium.