The Frank Bough of Jazz
author: Chatroom Charlie
In Lewis Taylor, prog-infused, blue-eyed UK soul has long had its Des Lynam. However, that made the lack of a Frank Bough even more palpable. Then, mirabile dictu, with this 2004 effort, Joocypeach supremo Dave Putson looked to have filled the gap. In the three years since its release, this album has attained something approaching 'classic' status. I, for one, would love to hear some new material.
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A collection of exhilarating instrumentals and fascinating songs transfigured in
author: Stephen Smithson
The guitar-driven instrumentals that make up the bulk of this collection are as exhilarating as anything you’ll hear this year.
The songs suffer at times from lyrical predictability – hard to avoid when you rely as much on rhyme as the librettists employed here – but the subject-matter is at least always interesting, and the material is always transfigured in some way by the performance.
The best example of this is ‘His Eyes’. From a read-through of the lyric sheet, one might summarize this crudely as a complaint by a parent without custody about the inadequacy of his access rights; cynically as an attempt to write an anthem for Fathers For Justice; and generously as John Martyn’s No Little Boy rewritten by somebody who has at least read What Maisie Knew (though the decision to keep the child a boy is, of course, problematic).
But all the above considerations are cast aside when you hear these words sung in a female voice; and all suspicions that the whole might become an exercise in self-pity are dispelled as soon as that infectious, upbeat piano motif makes its entrance.
Tried & Tested, meanwhile, is more ambiguous still. At the hands of David Byrne, say, this kind of deadpan, Jimmy Swaggart-style sermon against lust would receive a reassuringly (and irritatingly) ‘knowing’ satirical treatment. But I challenge anybody to work out an implied authorial position here.
It’s all stimulating stuff, then, and it’s recommended unreservedly.
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