Mojave 3 – Ask Me Tomorrow

Mojave 3’s founding members are vocalist/guitarist Neil Halstead, bassist/vocalist Rachel Goswell, and drummer Ian McCutcheon. The band broke cover in 1995, when a six-track demo impressed 4AD sufficiently to offer them a deal, despite a then-prevailing musical climate of bumptious Britpop that seemed totally at odds with what Mojave 3 were doing. Their incongruence was hardly surprising given that Halstead, Goswell and McCutcheon had formed as members of definitive shoegazers Slowdive, while guitarist Simon Rowe had previously served with dreampop kindred spirits Chapterhouse.

Mojave 3’s debut, Ask Me Tomorrow, was a refreshingly stripped down collection that changed little from the original demos. Halstead’s melodic, folk- and country-tinged songs drew favourable (if lazy) comparisons to Nick Drake, Cowboy Junkies and Bob Dylan.

Three years later, Out Of Tune continued where the first album left off and showed a group that had grown in both confidence and cohesiveness.

Third album Excuses For Travellers contained some of the most ambitious Halstead compositions yet.

Spoon and Rafter followed three years later marking another shift for the band. While still containing echoes of singer-songwriters and alt-country, the record represents a technicolor expansion of their palette that utilizes electronics, glockenspiels, melodica, and Beatlesque production.

Their final album, 2006’s Puzzles Like You is a positively bright and fun record that feels right at home next to indie rock contemporaries like The Shins and Band of Horses, while sounding nearly unrecognizable next to the band they were on Ask Me Tomorrow.