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 we get sent but we reckon the picks below deserve a nod. Click on the links to hear a song.
A regular destination for this column is Portland, Oregon and so it is that we have a brace of songs from James Cook under the guise of Captain’s Audio Project who have released a debut album “Waiting For The Moon”. Cook has a track record with another band, Trashcan Joe who specialise in performing on instruments made out of found objects including a trash can banjo, leaning heavily on original music influenced by vintage jazz records. Here he plays a 1931 National Tenor Resonator Guitar on a set of songs which stray from jazz, clinging more to a primitive American folk sound. With a small band behind him which includes Portland’s premier pedal steel player Paul Brainard there’s a whiff of Michael Hurley in some of the songs here, in particular ‘Freak’. A fine listen
Syracuse’s Ryan Holweger’s latest album “The Golden Paper Flower” breezes in like a breath of fresh air. The album opens with a couple of songs which have a touch of Israel Nash’s cosmic country sounds, wispy vocals swirling over spacey guitar, but there is more light and shade here than on the recent Nash albums, most evident on the billowing pedal steel laced ‘Bleed All Over’. Holweger duets with Reagan Helen on the very attractive ‘Settle In Easy’ where the piano player sounds as if he’s playing in a last chance saloon and , for anyone who hankers for a hang dog tale which roams from plaintive banjo picking to a soaring rock chorus, ‘Dehydration’ is just the song for you. Highly recommended. We’re unable to link to any of the songs as yet but here’s a short video trailer for the album.
Ali and The Wild Geese fly in from Austin, Texas with their debut album, “Next”, described in the PR blurb as “inventive, risky, soulful, and timeless music.” We have to disagree here as the band’s skilful mix of string band, bluegrass and lounge songs isn’t particularly inventive nor risky. While there’s a slight hint of Dan Hicks in some of the songs there’s little sense of swing or indeed, of any “joi de vivre” here. Instead we get a well mannered and well played set of songs which might go down well in an intimate live setting but it’s all just a bit too refined for this reviewer who prefers bands to let their hair down. The closest Ali and her Geese get to this is on ‘Bad Detective‘.
Brooklyn’s Barry Oreck harks back to the heyday of folk protest songs, best summarised on the second song from his latest album “We Were Wood”. ‘Build Me A City‘ invokes biblical references as Oreck sings about a historical New York developer who greased palms to get his vision of the city off the ground. Likewise, ‘The Norris Damn’ recalls the events which caused Tennessee farmers to be forced off of their land in the cause of modernisation. While his heart is in the right place Oreck just sounds like an artist out of his time for much of the album. He invokes Pete Seeger as an inspiration and that just about sums up the disc. It’s earnest and worthy but hearing him sing a song such as ‘The Crabbit Wee Tailors Of Forfar’ is just too earnest.
From Brooklyn we head to New Jersey for a listen to Dave Murphy. Something of a veteran, Murphy has been in the hinterland of American music for many years, he seems to have played with or supported numerous acts familiar to readers here and “A Heart So Rare” is his seventh album. It’s a fine collection of well honed songs which vary from the sweeping romanticism of ‘October Skies’ (which features a cool guitar solo from James Maddock) and the slow heartburn of ‘Strawberry Red’ to the very handsome acoustic ballad which is ‘Josephine’, a song eclipsed by the excellent ‘Planet Of Pain II’ which is quite gorgeous with its layers of pedal steel as Murphy edges close to a Hayes Carll sound. Murphy condenses his best in the glistening ‘Take A Ride With Me’ which has an organ solo which recalls the work of the late Garth Hudson. Definitely an album to explore.
Finally, we head to a new destination for this column, the Czech Republic, where we find an album called “What Do You Mean By That?” from Jakub Šimanský. It’s an instrumental album featuring lashes of acoustic guitar and other stringed instruments playing, as the artist says, a “varied mix of rhythms, non-standard tunings and unexpected combinations” and it’s quite hypnotic. Guaranteed to please fans of American Primitivism purveyors such as John Fahey and Robbie Basho, Šimanský seems quite the wizard on tunes such as ‘Devshirme‘ and ‘Get Me On The Horses’.
