Beautifully rendered dust covered tales from off the beaten track
This is a record with an enormous appeal; the broken fractured heart that drives the songs and the materials that they are built from combine so well together that they prove almost addictive. The songs are like wreckage ripped from a palace of song - they are base coats that allow rawness to show through. ‘This Same Heart’ is a voice and acoustic guitars, emotion and music trying to make sense of something that is unreasonable, ‘Blue’ is cut from the same cloth as the stately melancholia of Sophia. The songs themselves are like fragments of longer narratives and he fully inhabits the characters marooned in them, his croaky sing-speak perfect for ‘Ballad of a Skinwalker’ whilst a more hopeful voice narrates ‘Butterflies and Coyotes’. ‘Romeo 58’ is a 50’s song story as performed by the Tall Dwarves.
‘Londoner’s Guide to Southland’ is like a drunken dream, voices popping up out of nowhere as the tune staggers around, occasionally tries to gets to its feet, has moments of lucidity and a suitably sing-along chorus with rambling half-sensible verses. ‘Hold On’ is an altogether different type of a dream; this one is rooted in anxiety, the persistent percussive throb of the guitar replicating the aching tiredness of too many nights spent in shallow sleep waiting for the phone to ring, the vocals mumbling like they don’t want to be clear about the subject and all the while the screen door in your mind bangs on its loose hinge. Each of these songs is unremarkable in themselve - put them together and they really start to add up to something, and by the time you get to the mandolin inspired ‘Amazing Grace’ – which for once actually sounds like it comes from someone who knows what wretched is – you want to learn more, to listen again and immerse yourself in these disjointed scenes. As a bonus the first 100 come with an individual photograph: mine shows an empty highway and ugly town and a beautiful mountain and if that doesn’t sum up the record, then nothing does.
Date review added: Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Reviewer: David Cowling
Reviewers Rating: 7outta
10 stars
David Cowling - American UK (Aug 9, 2006)