Historian of religions Mircea Eliade described shamans as specialists in ecstasy, able to "penetrate the underworld and rise to the sky" in a transcendent state. It is not surprising, then, that the word "shamanistic" has been used repeatedly over the past 25 years to describe the incendiary performances of Nashville's Dave Cloud and his band The Gospel of Power. Weekly late-night shows for the unenlightened Nashville masses quickly established Cloud as Music City's enfant terrible while garnering diehard converts along the way. Holding a dusty mirror to pop music's tawdry conventions, Cloud and his colleagues deftly dismember the Frankenstein monster of modern musical excess. Despite never previously leaving Nashville Dave has fans as far away as Paris and Auckland. As Edwin Pouncey of The Wire magazine noted, "he sounds more like a cross between acid-addled Roky Erickson and boozed Beat writer, the late Charles Bukowski, than Steve Earle or Willie Nelson."
Napoleon of Temperance is a 45 track, double CD retrospective including brand new originals. In April Dave Cloud and The Gospel of Power attempted their first European tour in support of this release. Cloud's handpicked contingent of caballeros will included members of Lambchop and Clem Snide and conjures the distinctive sonic magic Nashville has enjoyed for over two decades including appearances in the Norweigan National press profiled as this years âITâ guy of the 2006 BergenFest. Think Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart, Dan Treacy and Daniel Johnston and you have some idea of what was on show.
To measure the extent of Dave Clouds fanbase you only have to look east to our neighbours in Norway - so excited were they of his arrival that they asked him personally to rename a venue in his honour. The Old Radisson Hotel in downtown Bergen is now called âDave Clouds Club El Morroccoâ
