Our latest Short Cuts, a monthly feature where AUK casts a brief eye and ear on several albums we’ve received recently, which just didn’t make the cut for a full review. Like most major music websites, we can’t mention every album or EP we get sent, but we reckon the picks below deserve a nod. Click on the links to hear a song.
Hi ho and off we go for another brief delve into the barrel full of albums sent our way recently. First off, we have the Norwegian “pop folk and americana” duo We Met In June (comprised of Sara Rose Zadig and Gjest Ingeson Kvåle) on their second album “Going Home”. It’s a breezy affair which glides finely with the pair wispy in the vocal department and for the most part delivering an attractive sense of fine songwriting and bustling arrangements which hark back to earlier days. Chief among these is the dramatic murder ballad, which is Ease Me, while Imposter Fool scuttles along quite finely with an impressive band arrangement replete with squirrelling banjos and a hefty thump in the rhythm section. Overall, “Going Home” is quite impressive and worth searching out.
More down-to-earth are The Thumping Tommys, a London-based band keen to inhabit that popular turf of Celtic-based folk songs given a bit of a kick up the arse. To be fair to them, on their album “The Sharp Turns Of Life”, they aren’t the kind of wallopers who want to surf on the coattails of The Pogues; they’re much too polite. However, songs such as ‘My Old Bowler Hat’ and ‘The Dealers Blind’ do veer close to the arse kicking we mentioned earlier. Given that, although the album doesn’t leap out (one gets the sense that these songs are meant to be heard in a live setting), it’s a worthy listen and kudos to bandleader Benedict Amadeus Scrivener for actually visiting Lviv in war-torn Ukraine and writing about it on ‘This Old Town (Won’t Die Alone)’.
In a similar vein, although not having much of that Celtic drinking tradition, is Lost Post, a Southampton band who stride fiercely forward on their album “All We’ll Leave Is Dust”. It’s probably faint praise to say that it’s a worthy album; the band play well and the songs are all fine, but there’s little here to distinguish them from scores of local bands playing roots music here in the UK. More power to them, we say. Anyhow, as regards “All We’ll Leave Is Dust”, ‘These Fragile Wings’ harks back to the likes of Alan Hull’s kitchen sink folk songs, while ‘In Over Your Head’ is a fine banjo-driven song which allows that Lost Post can possibly reach out beyond their local following.
Staying local, in fact, rooting around AUK’s spiritual home of Liverpool, we have an album which is a bit of an oddity and a salute to a Liverpool songwriter. John Jenkins released his latest album, “Restless Hearts”, a few months ago, getting an 8/10 review from us. “Too Many Roads” is basically “Restless Hearts” reimagined and is delivered by 12 acts who each cover a song from the original album. A bold move, really, tempting hubris, tempered perhaps by Jenkins offering the album as a free download. Anyhow, the experiment works, and while the reworkings in themselves are all worthy of a listen, it’s instructive to listen to them in tandem with the original album. It’s a starker listen, with many of the songs stripped back: the best example being Robyn Gair’s delivery of ‘Too Many Roads’ while Will Riding adds some gravitas and doom to ‘Sound Of Thunder’. An interesting conceit.
In a similar vein, we have an artist, Jesca Hoop, revisiting earlier songs on “Selective Memory”, a stripped-back delivery of her 2017 release “Memories Are Now”. It’s a concept she has visited before (“The Deconstruction of Jack’s House” was, as it says on the label, a deconstruction of her earlier album, “The House That Jack Built”, from 2012). Recorded pretty much live at home with assistance from Chloe Foy and Rachel Rimmer, the album is definitely low-key, weighing heavily into the anti/freak/alt folk music purveyed by the likes of Alela Diane. It’s an engrossing listen, the pulsating repetition towards the end of ‘Cut Connection‘ being particularly mesmeric. The choral voices on ‘Unsaid’ are quite gorgeous, reminiscent of the McGarrigle sisters in their pomp and throughout the album Hoop tugs quite heavily on your emotions.
Next up, we scoot down under to lend an ear to Aussie band Good News Now We Can Eat All The Vampires and their debut album “Everything Is Fine”. The brainchild of Paul Francis Wood, apparently a bit of a mover in the Australian scene, the band offer up here a wonderful slice of sonic bliss with a set of songs which dip at times into cosmic realms but with deliberate stutters and odd interludes added, the whole mess whipped into an engaging and uplifting listen. The glistening ‘The Colour Upstream‘ is the pinpoint here, but as the album meanders and shifts, there’s a whole lot here to savour.
Another release, which adds, not so much sonic interludes, but spooky little sonic backdrops to some darkly delivered songs (along with a mention of vampires on the fourth song here), is Denmark’s Jacob Faurholt’s latest self-titled album. Home-recorded, low-fi and decidedly wonky at times, the album inhabits that rare space occupied by the likes of Daniel Johnston and Mark Linkous. ‘Nothing Ever Ends‘ sounds like the type of song you might be forced to listen to on a boat ride with Charon as he pilots you to the underground, a feeling reinforced by the closing song ‘Painfully Alone’. Faurhalt lays his stall out from the start with the despairing ‘It’s The End Of The World’ and the whole album is quite deliciously nihilistic.
Luba Dvorak’s family fled Czechoslovakia in 1980, eventually relocating to Vancouver. A distant relative of the famous Czech composer, Dvořák, grew up listening to Petty and Springsteen and has several albums under his belt reflecting that. His latest, “Holding Pattern”, has a hint of bluegrass on several of the songs, including the title track, elsewhere, he’s a fairly standard purveyor of blue-collar tales, as on his version of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Lungs’ and his tale of a disaffected man, ‘Jackie Brown’. Here’s The Ghost from the album.
Finally, we head to the Netherlands for a listen to some surftastic instrumental rock from The Men From Nowhere on their self-titled album. Basically, it’s what you would expect from such a description, with twangy guitars and pounding drums aplenty, but the 12 tunes here are actually quite varied, with all but one (‘The Man From Nowhere’, originally by Jet Harris) written by lead guitarist Jelle van Atten who adds some perspective with his detailed notes on the origin of each song. So, for example, you find out that ‘House of Love‘ was inspired by the chord progression used in both The Animals’ ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and The Yardbirds’ ‘For Your Love’. There’s sand, surf, shoot-outs, and soul all included on an album which should appeal to all lovers of instrumental rock ‘n’ roll.
