E-Mail This Article to a Friend Law and disorder Richard Davies lives locally and thrives musically BY JONATHAN PERRY

Richard Davies surveys his music as he would contemplate a painting, hearing it from as many angles and vantage points as possible in order to get a better perspective. Over the course of a decade-plus career, he’s gone from leading the subversively eccentric Australian indie-rock outfit the Moles, to crafting arch orchestral pop as one half of the short-lived enigma called Cardinal, to releasing a handful of keenly observed, classic-sounding discs as a solo artist. The impetus behind all the deliberate 180-degree turns, Davies says, is an appetite for examining the processes by which he makes music. At the crux of his scrutiny is the hope and desire that, in doing so, the songs will reveal some new secret to him: about their construction, about their content, and most important, about himself as their creator.

This impulse to push forward has usually resulted in one Davies project sounding nothing like the next one, and it’s been his modus operandi for as long as he can remember. Davies’s first solo disc, the breezy, spare There’s Never Been a Crowd Like This (Flydaddy, 1996), for instance, was a marked departure from the lushly arranged strings and Bacharachian horn charts that permeated Cardinal’s homonymous disc (Flydaddy, 1994) — which in turn was a dramatic about-face from the Moles’ art-damaged post-punk. "Crowd was absolutely a demo," recalls Davies. "I wanted to leave out anything that would have stopped me from seeing clearly. I wanted to better understand myself as a musician at that point."

Finally, though, Davies is allowing himself to look back, and with fondness. The occasion is next month’s release of what Davies describes as the definitive Moles document, a compilation called On the Street that’s coming out on the Warren, Rhode Island-based Wishing Tree label. The two-disc overview, culled from the band’s 1992 debut, Untune the Sky (Seaside) and assorted EPs and singles, is being packaged with Rare & Weird, a nine-track bonus disc of previously unreleased but fully realized songs and demos. For Davies, a Sydney native who’s lived in the Boston/Cambridge area for most of the past 10 years with a brief stop in upstate New York (he and his wife, who grew up in Boston, were scheduled to move last month from South Boston to a new home on Cape Cod), putting together On the Street has brought him full circle.

"This is always what I wanted the Moles to appear as, and these couple of records sewed it up. This is something that I feel is whole," Davies says over lunch one afternoon at the Middle East, which, he mentions, was the first club the Moles played when they ventured from Sydney to the United States on their maiden voyage in 1992. Davies claims he never felt particularly close to a 1999 reissue of Untune the Sky put out by his former label, the now-defunct Newport, Rhode Island, imprint Flydaddy. That disc added four songs from a pair of out-of-print seven-inch singles, making Sky an ad-hoc compilation of sorts. "I had a lot of great work with Flydaddy, but I really didn’t have any input with the Moles stuff, so that was the only thing about the relationship that worried me a little bit," he says. "But I did get a lot of input with this release, and that was a big thing for me. When we were sequencing it and mastering it and listening to it very intensely, I fell in love with it again. When I listen back now after all this time, I really see the value of the way I was thinking when I was with the Moles."

The 12-track disc that constitutes On the Street opens in prototypical Moles fashion — that is, oddly — with what sounds like an orchestra pit’s worth of brass and Davies’s voice floating in gauzy echo, announcing the band’s signature single, "What’s The New Mary Jane" (the title was nicked from a much-bootlegged Beatles outtake that remained unreleased until it appeared years later on the Fab Four’s Anthology set). From there, a clotted roil of distorted electric guitars enters the picture, pushed along by drummer Carl Zadro’s pulsing backbeat and the murky rumble of Glenn Fredericks’s bass. The horns, augmented by a cathedral’s choir of voices and the drone of organ, periodically re-emerge in the mix before retreating back into the clamor of guitars. The song, Davies says, was a product of both imagining what that Beatles tune might sound like — he never heard it — and the Moles’ impressions of experiencing New York City.

Elsewhere, vertiginous tracks like "Curdle" and "Accidental Saint" suggest early Pink Floyd, or perhaps what Syd Barrett or Robyn Hitchcock might sound like had they fronted the Clean. The Fall-like racket, "Tendrils and Paracetamol," builds on a tension-wire bass line before it’s sabotaged completely by an angry mob of guitars and a suddenly downshifting tempo — making it even more Fall-like. The acid wail of keening bagpipes lends extra weirdness to "Wires," a Spacemen 3 drone that finds Davies repeating the line "untune their heads" for added deranged effect. One of Davies’s favorite tracks, though, is a dryly sardonic early version of "Bury Me Happy" from the Rare & Weird disc (which was mostly compiled by the band’s in-house historian and curator, Fredericks, who saved the band’s demos and live recordings). "It’s much closer to the mood I wrote the song in," Davies recalls. "It was about being a student in a student bar at 9 o’clock on a Friday night, watching all these people that you can’t relate to."

Davies continues, "Sometimes I get asked the question, ‘What was the idea behind the Moles, what was the concept?’ And why did they stop after four or five years — apart from the practical reasons, like we were living like Oliver Twist stealing potatoes on the sidewalk. But we had an intention of experimenting, and utterly our only rule was to be true to making our own music, and that the songs would be intrinsically strong. If you peek through some of the weird arrangements, the songs are always pretty strong.

"Other than that, we were taking chances constantly. The reason the Moles ended, from an artistic point of view, is that when you listen to these two records, we kind of achieved that." Davies doesn’t sound bothered by the Moles’ inability to break through to a bigger audience, like some other indie artists of the day: "We didn’t have an option, I don’t think, to calculate ways to be commercially successful because we weren’t capable of it. What we were capable of is what we did. We couldn’t be accused of trying to pander to anybody."

As with so much of his old band’s unpredictable-bordering-on-haphazard approach to writing and recording, the idea for On the Street happened almost by accident. Initially, Wishing Tree sent Davies an e-mail inviting him to contribute a track to the label’s annual Amos House series compilation, which benefits a Rhode Island homeless shelter. When he agreed, they asked whether there was any material, old or new, that he’d like to release. At the moment, Davies is also working on a new solo album at ex-Small Factory guitarist Dave Auchenbach’s home studio in Providence, Rhode Island, and claims it’s the best thing he’s ever done. The album, Tonight’s Music, is slated to be released next spring or summer. Davies says he feels it represents a synthesis of his earlier experimental leanings with the Moles and the more traditionally structured work that marked solo efforts like Telegraph (Flydaddy, 1997) and Barbarians (Kindercore, 2000).

"I’ve always been a huge fan of Richard’s work," says Wishing Tree’s David Silva, who co-founded the label in 1999 with girlfriend Kyle Thompson and credits friends at Flydaddy with helping them get the imprint off the ground. "When Flydaddy went under, all of Davies’s work went under with them. And I thought it would be a shame to have all that stuff lost. He’s a brilliant songwriter, and I think he makes music because he has to. I think he sees the world through music."

Silva says plans are underway to re-release several out-of-print Davies titles over the next year, including a deluxe reissue of Cardinal’s seminal chamber-pop opus that will include unreleased tracks from Davies’s collaboration with Eric Matthews, Cardinal’s other half. In the meantime, Davies is slated to play his first show in ages, opening a date in November for Guided by Voices (GbV’s manager, David Newgarden, contributed horns to 1994’s Instinct, which was essentially a Davies solo album, and a Moles project in name only).

These days when he’s not writing songs, Davies, 39, is an attorney with a "small general practice." He passed the bar exam this past February and seems pleased at having done so, though it’s obvious he’d rather talk music. The discipline and focus necessary to finish law school, he says, has yielded new creative perspective, new angles to survey. "Having to focus my mind on law really helped me as a musician — it was like cross-training. And studying law in America is kind of like a crash course in America. Every day, I felt I was getting an education."

Still, it would be hard to match those mercurial, adventuresome days of playing shabby radio stations and seedy Australian pubs. The Moles, Davies says, "was just this huge opportunity. I was drifting around the city from girlfriend to girlfriend, from crappy room to crappy room, but I felt very free with it. I felt like I had a lot of freedom and that I was on a real journey."