Filthy Frozen River Rag’ is a collage of snapshots – a high(low?)light reel of a period of time when things were in a definite state of flux. The tracks drift in and out of cohesion, and things occasionally veer off into a no man’s land similar to the grey area between dreams and REM sleep, with the occasional nightmare thrown in for good measure Although there is a mix of full band tracks and solo performances, the majority of the material is made up of rough hewn acoustic songs that were recorded in that manner intentionally, and not as sketches or demos (how much better are some of those Ray Davis demos than finished Kinks songs?) Dan Melchior is originally from the suburbs of London, though he has been living in the USA for the last 16 years. First appearing on record in 1997, he has since recorded over 35 lps, and collaborated with artists as diverse as Billy Childish and Graham Lambkin. He is arguably the only artist to have emerged from the ‘Medway Scene’ that has actually managed to plough a furrow outside of that very narrow field. In the worlds of Steve Lowenthal – ‘Dan Melchior is an anomaly in the modern music world, even for the underground. As one of the world’s last truly great songwriters, Melchior’s voice grows stronger than ever over a string of recent releases by his “band” Das Menace. His music can’t be neatly partitioned into a narrow genre although one can detect elements of blues, vintage R&B, British psych pop and more recently even brazen experimentalism