#6 Iced To Mode - Misty Dixon

According to Wikipedia, Misty Dixon was a "folktronica project" Jane Weaver was involved with for a couple of years in the very early 2000s. The band released several singles, most of which I have but not quite all, and one album, this one, Iced To Mode.

Folktronica is almost self-explanatory and it must have been popular around that time because even Madonna was doing it, supposedly. I should probably check that one out. I've always liked Madonna.

If I hadn't read Wikipedia, I'd have called what Misty Dixon were doing psychfolk, which to my way of listening is pretty much what Jane Weaver's being doing all her life. Even some of the Kill Laura stuff sounds like psychfolk to me. 

Call it what you want, it's magnificent. I liked it so much I fitted one of the tracks to some video I took and put it up on my YouTube channel. To make absolutely sure no-one would ever see it I didn't use either the band's name or the name of the song. That might have cost me anything up to half a dozen views in the first few years, given how popular Jane Weaver was until recently.

It was the first video I ever uploaded to my then brand new channel. It went up in February 2012. In nine and a half years it's amassed a staggering twelve views, making it the second-least watched of all my videos, beaten in utter lack of interest only by this year's entry on the addition of music content to the Art mmo Occupy White Walls, which I made to accompany this blog post. 

From all of this I conclude that making videos is possibly not the best use of my time but I enjoy doing it once in a while so I suppose I'll carry on. At least now I get the opportunity to embed it here and pretty pleased about it I'm feeling, too. It's not as though there's a plethora of Misty Dixon videos to choose from, after all.

There's not an awful lot I can tell you about Misty Dixon other than it's a tragedy that a tragedy finished their career far too, far too soon. One album was not enough. Not nearly enough. Not when they were making music like this.

What happened, according to Wikipedia, (I'd fact-check it but where?) was that Dave Tyack, who played drums and piano in the band and co-wrote two of Iced To Mode's tracks with Jane, disappeared in the summer of 2002, almost immediately after the release of Weaver's mini-album, Like An Aspen Leaf, on which he also played and which could easily have featured in this list because it's brilliant.

He'd also finished the recording of Iced To Mode, which wasn't released until the following year, at which time Tyack was still missing. His body was eventually found on Corsica, where he'd been... 

I don't know what he'd been doing. The Wikipedia entries don't say. Taking a well-earned holiday after finishing work on two superb albums, I imagine. Relaxing by going climbing or hiking through the rugged Corsican countryside. Falling to his death somewhere so remote no-one found his body for two years. 

Rock and roll, eh? Nico fell off a bicycle. You never know when it's coming, do you?

 

For all the album's a group project by an actual group that played gigs and suchlike, every track bar one is written by Jane Weaver except for a stunning cover of Prince's The Beautiful Ones and every track bar none sounds like no-one other than Jane. She overwhelms everyone as she should.

I kind of wish I'd put all her albums in the list now but then who would I have left out? There needs to be room for more than twenty-five albums in my top twenty five albums, that's all there is to it. 

Damn this space-time continuum and its inflexible laws of physics!