Album Notes

Shabby Road is the new CD by Pat Orchard available as a limited edition import only.

Anyone who has seen Pat perform live knows that he can create a stunning effects with just one acoustic guitar.

Powerful songs using open-tuned acoustic guitar with effects...a cross between Nick Drake and Pink Floyd!

Anyone who witnessed Pat Orchard's several memorable performances at Terrastock 3 (where he played everyday, throwing himself into the event completely with all the abandon we've grown to love of our favoured artists) will welcome this new release with open arms.

'Shabby Road' captures his heart-felt songwriting, passion-streaked vocals and lyrical genius in a way none of his records have done before. Largely gone are the studio effects, instead its just Pat, his voice and his layers of twenty-fingered guitar, sounding much the way he did on stage that unforgettable weekend in August.

Falling stylistically somewhere close to early John Martyn and the sound of those classic Witchseason Productions, Pat Orchard's songs invariably tell a story - and the 'Shabby Road' album is no exception. There's a thematic link of remembrance which begins with the title track - a trenchant snapshot of city living on the borderline, despairing lyrics set against the chiming guitar line which at once lifts and chills like a dark green ocean swell - works through established favorites such as the brilliantly evocative 'Night Train' and then gazes inwards again with 'Sunday Parade', a harrowing evocation of a small-town Poppy Day march set to music. This proves to be a poignent poetical interlude squeezed between the fusillade of cascading notes of the updated (and to my mind much improved, if fractionally truncated) 'Indian Giver', and another song of remembrance, the lively 'Wild West End'. 'Poormans Earth is a gem in the classic Pat Orchard mould, followed by another number which has received a major overhaul, 'Sirens Call'. Always a haunting piece, its given an added dimension with a shimmering Leslie-guitar intro and a slower free fall ride into the lyrical depths of the song.

Just like Pat's performances at Terrastock, this is an hours worth of music that you sense both you and he cant bear to end.

One of those feelings, and one of those albums, you wont be able to part with. Buy it now.

(above review by Phil McMullen - Ptolemaic Terrascope)