Album Notes

James William Hindle
Prospect Park (Badman Recording Co.)

What, you didn't know that British folk is suddenly hip this year? Don't you read Mike McGuirk? It's true. All those Richard Thompson jokes made by smarmy young music critics have come back to bite them all in the arse like a pair of 20-sided dice with rotting, crooked teeth. It may have started when the folks at Volkswagen took liberties with a dead man's song--every record collector has a friend who was livid when Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" suddenly served to hock the convertible Cabriolet. Or it may have begun when Welsh band Gorky's Zygotic Mynci dressed up their outstanding 2001 album The Blue Trees with the same kind of woodland instrumentation and dislocated arrangements once reserved for recordings by UK hippie folk rockers, the Incredible String Band. Hell, even the Winter Flowers were getting so popular this year that they had to pack up their lutes and leave the Bay Area for Los Angeles. And now that Pavement's Stephen Malkmus has begun ripping off Mellow Candle guitar leads and dropping names like Vashti Bunyan, it just makes more sense that a guy like James William Hindle could make a subtly stylish and exquisite sounding album like Prospect Park in the year 2003. Not that he's singing about faeries and mice and shit, but with a backing band that comprises members of Ladybug Transistor and Essex Green, Hindle's sophomoric long player is made up of the kind of amorous songs that will sit well between Nick Drake musings and Sandy Denny outtakes on that mixed tape you've been making to impress the cute girl at the record store who told you she likes the Fairport Convention. Hindle gets extra points for actually being English and for rocking a pointy beard on the gatefold picture of this fine recording. He's done for British folk what the Beachwood Sparks did for '70s LA canyon rock.
Eric Shea- East Bay Express