Michael Rault

Happily borrowing elements from garage rock, psychedelic singer/songwriters, soft funk, and '70s rock radio hooks, singer and multi-instrumentalist Michael Rault has crafted a sound that's comforting without being a museum piece. His early records, like the 2012 EP Whirlpool, showed off some tough garage chops, but as he grew older, the balance shifted to the kind of sweetly lilting ballads one might hear on a Paul McCartney solo album. Working with the Daptone Records crew, he gave these introspective songs a tight and snappy underpinning on records like 2018's It's a New Day Tonight and 2022's Michael Rault that balance the retro with the up-to-date quite nicely. Rault began his career in the mid-2000s, releasing a series of self-produced CD-Rs in his native city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. With a reputation for classic, retro-inspired songcraft, he was eventually signed to Sony Canada imprint Pirates Blend, which released his 1950s rock-inspired debut album, Ma-Me-O, in 2010. After relocating to Toronto in 2012, he followed up with the Whirlpool EP, a seven-song set that owed a larger debt to '60s garage and psychedelia. He became increasingly involved with other eccentric notables from the Toronto indie scene like Young Guv and Slim Twig, whose band Rault also played in. As he continued to develop his blend of psych, garage, retro R&B, and oddball guitar rock, he attracted the Burger Records, which released his Still Not Sad/Nothing Means Nothing single in 2014. Rault's long-awaited follow-up LP, Living Daylight, arrived in early 2015. While on tour with soul singer Charles Bradley and then King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Rault made the acquaintance of Wayne Gordon, head honcho at the Daptone Records studio. This led to Rault heading to the studio in Brooklyn to work on some song ideas he had. Gordon liked what he heard and signed Rault to Daptone's Wick Records subsidiary, and the pair worked together to finish an album, bringing in new influences like folk-rock and '70s AOR while recording directly to tape to get a warm and organic sound. Less garage rock throwback and more classic rock replay, the resulting It's a New Day Tonight was released in May 2018, after which Rault and his live band headed out on tour. When they returned home to Montreal, Rault severed ties both personal and professional and spent the cold winter writing songs. When he emerged, he made the decision to move to Los Angeles, where he became a reliable session player for artists like Pearl Charles, Drugdealer, and PAINT. When Rault was ready to record his next album, he once again rallied the Daptone crew to help out on the sessions. The songs they worked on were mainly melancholy piano ballads with tightly funky beats, along with the occasional synth-heavy rocker that somehow called to mind Harry Nilsson and the Steve Miller Band at once. The self-titled album was issued in early 2022, not long after Rault had joined the backing band of Zambian psych-rock act Witch for a series of U.S. shows.
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