Biography
A prominent presence amid Nashville's subterranean rock circles, Dave Cloud pursued multiple callings as vocalist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, performer, verse writer, and raconteur, cultivating a devoted niche audience through extravagant stage spectacles that evoked a hallucinatory blend of Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits refracted via the persona and timbre of a rundown yet assured cabaret entertainer. Born August 3, 1956, in Nashville, Tennessee, he first picked up the guitar during adolescence. Immersed from youth in the sounds of 1960s and 1970s rock, he forged personal musical convictions, yet regular public appearances did not begin until his early twenties because of performance anxiety. Late in the 1970s he joined forces with the punk outfit Psychotic Night Auditors, mounting unruly, raucous gigs at both the faded Springwater Supper Club & Lounge and the local music hub Lucy's Record Shop. When his sonic experiments proved excessive even for those tolerant spaces, he devoted several years to solitary tape-based collage compositions while employed by the Nashville library system as a narrator recording books and comics for visually impaired patrons. Returning to the stage in 1994, he resumed regular appearances at Springwater and collaborated with James Clauer in Cruel Oval Brown Stomachs, merging avant-garde theatrics with experimental sound in a manner perfectly matched to his abilities.
After the group's dissolution a year later, Cloud introduced Dave Cloud & the Gospel of Power in 1996, taking the ensemble's name from a used cassette of Christian sermons he had employed for noise experiments. Delivering gritty, fragmented, lo-fi garage rock while reciting beat-inflected verses in a resonant tone that encompassed 1950s-style ballads and stream-of-consciousness improvisations, the band built an underground Nashville following; its fluid roster frequently featured players from Lambchop, the Silver Jews, Trauma Team, Clem Snide, and My Dad Is Dead. Filmmaker Harmony Korine discovered Cloud's frenetic shows and gave him a minor part in the 1997 feature Gummo. In 1999 musician Matt Swanson, previously associated with Cloud, determined that his artistic outlook merited preservation and produced the debut album Songs I'll Always Sing for release on his Thee Swan Recording Company imprint. The follow-up All My Best arrived in 2004; growing awareness of Cloud's singular rock vision prompted the British independent label Fire Records to sign him, resulting in the combined reissue of his initial two albums as Napoleon of Temperance. The Fire arrangement enabled Dave Cloud & the Gospel of Power to tour beyond the United States for the first time, performing in England and Denmark, where an appreciative listenership had already formed. From 2008 through 2012 the group issued three further recordings—Pleasure Before Business, Practice in the Milky Way, and Live at Gonerfest—while Cloud took another role in Korine's 2007 film Trash Humpers. Though he sustained an active performance calendar during the 2010s, declining health led to his death from melanoma complications at a Nashville hospital on February 18, 2015. Five months afterward, Fire issued his final album, Today Is the Day That They Take Me Away.
After the group's dissolution a year later, Cloud introduced Dave Cloud & the Gospel of Power in 1996, taking the ensemble's name from a used cassette of Christian sermons he had employed for noise experiments. Delivering gritty, fragmented, lo-fi garage rock while reciting beat-inflected verses in a resonant tone that encompassed 1950s-style ballads and stream-of-consciousness improvisations, the band built an underground Nashville following; its fluid roster frequently featured players from Lambchop, the Silver Jews, Trauma Team, Clem Snide, and My Dad Is Dead. Filmmaker Harmony Korine discovered Cloud's frenetic shows and gave him a minor part in the 1997 feature Gummo. In 1999 musician Matt Swanson, previously associated with Cloud, determined that his artistic outlook merited preservation and produced the debut album Songs I'll Always Sing for release on his Thee Swan Recording Company imprint. The follow-up All My Best arrived in 2004; growing awareness of Cloud's singular rock vision prompted the British independent label Fire Records to sign him, resulting in the combined reissue of his initial two albums as Napoleon of Temperance. The Fire arrangement enabled Dave Cloud & the Gospel of Power to tour beyond the United States for the first time, performing in England and Denmark, where an appreciative listenership had already formed. From 2008 through 2012 the group issued three further recordings—Pleasure Before Business, Practice in the Milky Way, and Live at Gonerfest—while Cloud took another role in Korine's 2007 film Trash Humpers. Though he sustained an active performance calendar during the 2010s, declining health led to his death from melanoma complications at a Nashville hospital on February 18, 2015. Five months afterward, Fire issued his final album, Today Is the Day That They Take Me Away.
Albums
Singles
