Call the bank manager: it’s new release Friday!

I wouldn’t be the first and probably not the last to say the music industry is totally out of touch, but that this particular Friday falls shortly before most people’s monthly payday, means that many bank accounts are currently running on fumes. Which calls into question the scheduling of a whole slew today of blockbuster albums. I’ve counted at least ten, including the likes of Adele’s unimaginatively-titled 30 (for which vinyl pressing resources have reportedly been consumed, allegedly causing production problems for everyone else). 

I’ll spare you any further consideration of the Adele album - you’ll be hearing enough of it until she releases 35 or 40, or whatever will be her next maudlin confessional - and instead cock a learned ear to the new offerings from Elbow, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, and Sting, simply because they’re the three of today’s release tsunami that actually interest me.

Elbow - Flying Dream 1

As regulars to this blog will hopefully recall, barely two months ago Elbow dished up an evening of sublime comfort food listening with what was, for many of us at the Hammersmith Apollo, the first gig in almost two years thanks to the pandemic. It was, in any case, the perfect return to gigging, delivered by one of the UK’s finest live acts, anchored by their avuncular lead singer and a set of trademark “soaring” singalong anthems that have brightened many an outdoor summer festival. The set included a cameo from this new album in the delightful What I Am Without You. It gave a glimpse of the somewhat album’s somewhat warmer direction than 2019’s Giants Of All Sizes  (and a song vaguely reminiscent of Clive Dunn’s Grandad…) Dream 1 completes this evolution with what can only be described as an absolutely gorgeous album, a cosy, comforting duvet in a winter’s morning that comprehensively taps into Elbow’s undoubted craft for tenderness, both musically and, inevitably, in Guy Garvey as principle lyricist.

Garvey is a core part of Elbow’s “value proposition”, to use an excruciatingly wanky marketing phrase. His immensely likeable persona pours forth from his words and those mellifluous Bury tones that adorn his delivery on radio and TV outings. But it would be wholly wrong to depict Elbow - and Garvey’s presence - as a schmaltz act. They’ve just come up with a formula that allows for melodicism, romantic escape and, yes, even a prog rock sensibility. Flying Dream 1 has the not original precept of being a lockdown album (as, it would appear, are most examples of the current slew), but comes from a performance premise, having been recorded live at Brighton’s Theatre Royal while it was shut to audiences during the pandemic. Of course, all recordings are “live”, but here is an old-fashioned approach, harking back to the days before endless overdubs and, latterly, the digital recording of entire albums on iPhones. Bruce Springsteen’s recent Letter To You was thusly done, and it gives an immediacy without any excess ambience due to the venue. Perhaps, though, it’s what makes Flying Dream 1 sound tight and efficient, genuine even, painting beautiful landscapes about love (The Only Road), hope (After The Eclipse), childhood (Calm And Happy) and the tenderness of the title track. Inveterate romantics might be, as I write, beating a path to their local record emporium/streaming site to wallow in Adele’s latest collection of mawkishness, but as I become ever more reflective myself and, just a little soppy as I prepare for marriage, I know which album I’d rather be immersing myself in. And Flying Dream 1 is its name.

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raise The Roof

Like Peter Gabriel, it’s still impossible - annoyingly, perhaps - to separate Robert Plant from the band he fronted many years ago, despite both putting considerable distance between the outfits they once fronted more than 40 years ago. It shouldn’t be necessary, in both cases, considering the bodies of work they’ve generated in the decades since. In Gabriel’s case, singer and group parted company, albeit amicably, and in Plant’s, the entire enterprise ground to an abrupt halt in the wake of its drummer’s misadventure-fuelled death in 1980. But with an uptick in Led Zeppelin activity, as their seminal fourth album recently reached its 50th anniversary, with the obligatory box set reminding everyone of rock’s most archetypal viking marauders, it’s hard not to be drawn on Plant’s legacy as the honey-tressed stage god. 

If, though, I could be afforded further licence to compare Gabriel and Plant, their post-band careers have followed similar paths, with both finding their groove in music drawn from a more eclectic palette of cultures than the pop, blues, soul and rock that fuelled their youthful ambition. Plant, in particular, has tapped authentically, post-Zepp, into Americana, reaching a particularly credible, Grammy-hoovering high in 2007 with Raising Sand, his first collaboration with bluegrass singer Alison Krauss. Working with roots authenticity’s go-to producer T Bone Burnett, Raising Sand shifted in impressive quantities, demonstrating an audience acceptance of a music form that Plant has approached passionately and with credibility as a solo artist, digging deep into a version of the blues that his Earth-conquering old vehicle at their core. The formula is reapplied by Plant and Krauss on their follow-up, 14 years later. With Burnett once again overseeing things, Raise The Roof continues where its predecessor left off with a delightful stroll through covers of bluegrass, rockabilly and folk, each balanced by Plant’s gentler singing side (no screaming "Valhalla!" here) and the more arguably more authentic rural voice of his junior partner, raised in small-town Illinois. 

Aided by a cast of faithfull sessioneers, Plant and Kraus work through a terrific hour’s worth of rug-cutters, including a lively reworking of Lucinda Williams’ Can’t Let Go (on which Williams appears herself), and a somewhat darker interpretation of the Everly Brothers’ The Price Of Love. Americana has found its way into British folk in many forms over the years, and here the duo take on the late Scottish folkie Bert Jansch’s Don’t Bother Me, with Krauss rather than Plant taking point (he reciprocates on Go Your Way by Anne Briggs, one of the legion of British folk stars to emerge in the late ’60s and early ’70s (along with John Martyn and Sandy Denny) who became huge influences on early Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Page in particular. Speaking of which, a pleasantly courageous cover of Jimmy Reed’s High And Lonesome by Plant and Krauss has an almost prog rock feel, due to its use of a mellotron to add a string canvass very different from the original’s boogie. There’s always, in my mind at least, a thin line between the various American roots music forms, be it blues or bluegrass, country or western (“We got both kinds!” to quote Bob of Bob’s Country Bunker in The Blues Brothers), but what you get with Raise The Roof is a loving nod to these genres without ever falling into parody of cultural appropriation. As we come closer to this year’s end, it’s already a very strong candidate for inclusion in the end-of-annum lists.

Sting - The Bridge

Lastly, we come to an artist with whom I go back a long way. Not in any personal capacity, you understand, but the second album that I ever bought with my own money was Reggatta de Blanc by The Police. Come to think of it, Sting falls into the same category as Gabriel and Plant, having once been the focal point of a recording unit for only a handful of years, before going solo, in Sting’s case with the release of The Dream Of The Blue Turtles in 1985. I slavishly bought its follow-ups before the law of diminishing returns started to kick in. Like many a mainstream artist in the upper quartile of superstardom, Sting basically became boring, to me at least. I was never fussed by all that tabloid tattle about tantric activities, or the perma-smugness of a wealthy man with his own Tuscan vineyard and one of the most envious lifestyles in pop. It was just that his music stopped doing anything for me, which is not the case with those other two frontmen who went on to do equally interesting things with the longer branches of their careers.

Which is why The Bridge is a bit of a punt. Will it reconnect me with Sting’s songcraft? Will it provide me with something new and engaging? Actually, it does, with a breadth of styles encompassing pop and rock, the jazz his solo career has frequently embraced and even folk and electronica. Songs like the opener, Rushing Water, even hark back to The Police in their pomp, while the genuinely tender lyrics of the lively (if slightly MOR) If It’s Love and For Her Love (vaguely reminiscent of his Shape Of Your Heart from 1993’s Ten Summoner's Tales) draw on a reflective, romantic side that Sting has always been able to call on with heart, when not busy trying to demonstrate the contents of his bookshelf with pretentious references to Jungian philosophy and Shakespearian sonnets. The Book Of Numbers shows that Sting can still rock out, while the electronic beats of Loving You - arguably the album’s highlight - evokes a contemporary feel, with a distinctly dark soulfulness. He has, in the past, looked slightly twattish for his collaborations with hip-hop artists and the appropriation that entails, but here, Loving You gets the balance between modernity and intrigue absolutely right.

Amazingly, The Bridge is Sting’s 14th solo album, and while it lacks some of the edge of his earlier career, it’s entirely enjoyable, even if it falls, musically, into a category of records that will inevitably find their way into the Christmas stockings of grannies, bought for them at the Asda checkout. Yes, that puts The Bridge in a similar cadre as the likes of Coldplay and Ed Sheeran (and obviously Adele) but without wishing to sound ageist, you can’t help but feeling that Sting has earned the right to be so preeminent. As much as Sheehan, in particular, gets regularly feted, Sting has just fired off a warning reminder that he is still an absolute master of this stuff. As David Crosby demonstrated earlier this year with his masterful For Free, not all pop chops fade with age. Sting, who turned 70 in October, has shown, too, that age is not only just a number, but if you apply yourself, continuing to write and record new music long after the teenage posters have been torn down doesn’t have to be an exercise in mediocrity. Sting, consider me back! 

                                                                                                                                               

Return of the secret singer-songwriter

I don’t know when Peter Bruntnell decided upon Journey To The Sun as the title of his latest album, but it was with some irony, given that none of us are going anywhere right now, in search of sunshine or anything else. Then again, the Kingston-upon-Thames-raised “secret singer-songwriter” now lives in Devon, which I associate with glorious childhood journeys down the A303 for Whitsun half term, dodging torrents of rain on Dartmoor, of course, but also enjoying the splendours of the South Hams and the West Country sunsets streaming in through my aunt and uncle’s Plymouth living room window. 

Bruntnell is, it would appear, something of an intentional enigma. Read any review of his 11 albums to date (including his last, King Of Madrid - my album of 2019) and you’ll see the same phrases repeated: that he is lauded by the music press (Rolling Stone branded him the best-kept secret in “England”), has been endorsed by R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Richmond Fontaine’s Willy Vlautin (“my favourite singer in the world”), is criminally underappreciated, and so on. It truly is baffling. But, as I noted in my recent review of the Matt Deighton Overshadowed documentary, there is an echelon of, mainly, singer-songwriters who just seem unable to edge - or be led - over the threshold of mainstream recognition, and the widespread success that comes with it.

So, materially, what makes Bruntnell so compelling, and why should you pay him attention? There are plenty of singer-songwriters, of course, and no shortage of guitar strummers - from Ed Sheeran-wannabes earnestly busking outside the local shopping precinct, to those with Neil Young/Nick Drake/John Martyn aspirations in every kind of venue (normally), from pubs up to arenas. Plus, if you dive down the myriad rabbit holes of sub-genres, the label ‘Americana’ will dish up no end of alt-country variants. Given the apparent need to slap a label on everything, it’s here that Bruntnell will probably get filed, but just because his songs might be acoustic guitar-based, with the occasional slither of pedal steel, it shouldn’t automatically mark him out for one genre or another. Indeed, Journey To The Sun, he says, draws on wider influences, including Brian Wilson’s arrangements and even Brian Eno’s ambient work. Other musicians called Brian may have played a part.

That, though, only outlines the form. What about the music itself? Like Deighton, Bruntnell’s is a mix of acoustic-tinged balladry and wry rock songs. To quote, unfortunately, Donny and Marie Osmond, a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. I don’t mean to be flippant. But this brings us to “Pete’s Basement Studio” at Bruntnell’s Devon bolthole, where Journey To The Sun was recorded. Like so many new albums Where Are We Now? has listened to in recent months, it was produced in lockdown, but while the enforced work-from-home that every musician has been required to adopt has often been influenced by the pandemic, it was always Bruntnell’s intention to work on a solo album during this period. It just happened to coincide with a pandemic. “That meant more acoustic guitar, and I bought a bouzouki in March last year, which really was a catalyst for quite a few songs being written in a very short timeframe,” he recently told Sean Hannam’s Say It With Garage Flowers blog. “Oh, and I got a drum machine and a new synthesiser, too.”

A synth? A bouzouki? On an album by a noted exponent of Americana? Well, yes. Because while the music business does love a label, Journey To The Sun lends itself to a more experimental direction. There is still the luscious, acoustic guitar balladeering that Bruntnell found such strength in on King Of Madrid, but there are also eccentric stabs of electronica, a drum machine and even that staple of prog rock, the Mellotron. While the overall tone might still be plaid-shirted, there is - for all the additional layers - a stripped-back feel, something he does admit was influenced by the vibe of the times without being directly informed by it.

Like so many of these WFH productions, digital technology meant Bruntnell wasn’t working entirely on his own, with several of the tracks featuring New England-based keyboardist Peter Linnane, while Bruntnell’s longtime lyricist collaborator Bill Ritchie contributes words to five of the songs. But, for the most part, this is a largely Bruntnell effort, with the vast majority of instruments played by himself. This is apparent from the outset with the mournful Dandelion, written on the aforementioned Greek mandolin, with the addition of rudimentary piano skills, giving the song a sparse and haunting folkiness. Lucifer Morning Star - performed entirely by Bruntnell - is brighter, made so by a combination of 12-string guitar and subtle synths giving it a sunny dimension. Runaway Car rocks along with the kind of energy that will make it an instant live highlight. It is precisely the sort of expressive, guitar-driven song American television shows love (as we’re still working our way through 15 years’ worth of Greys Anatomy, with its dizzying panoply of singer-songwriters on the soundtrack, I’m amazed its producers haven’t come knocking on Bruntnell’s door…).

Picture: Simon Poulter

The jangliness of Journey To The Sun is occasionally broken up by clear references to Eno, specifically his album Another Green World, finding itself in the intro of You’d Make A Great Widow (a typical piece of macabre Bruntnell humour, resulting from a chance remark by Mrs. B), as well as the instrumentals The Antwerp Effect and Moon Committee. They provide undistracting interludes between the folkier songs, such as Heart Of Straw and a beautiful interpretation of the much-covered Scottish traditional Wild Mountain Thyme - here blessed with a wonderful arrangement, featuring an electric 12-string superbly channelling Jerry Cole’s lead on The Beach Boys’ Sloop John B (fun fact: I have it on good authority that Bruntnell performed this very song at a junior school concert when he was a lad). That same shimmering guitar finds its way, with uplifting effect, onto the reflective closing piece, Mutha, which examines time’s passing with a sense of hope. The hope we probably all want right now.

Mine, amongst many other things, is that Journey To The Sun earns Peter Bruntnell greater recognition. It’s not, to be fair, an album of anthems, or chart hits, or daytime radio blockbusters. Not that everything in popular music should be. It is, though, delightful, earnest and wonderful listening, particularly repeatedly, drawing out Bruntnell’s intimate vocal style and drawing on his exquisite arrangements and self production. Will it be the album that breaks him to a wider audience? Will it end his status as the “secret singer-songwriter”? As I wrote about its predecessor, I wish it would. Because some secrets really are best out in the open for everyone to enjoy.

Journey To The Sun is out now on Domestico Records and can be ordered from here.

Get me to the church on time!

© Simon Poulter 2019

As I was compelled to mention in my recent post about Sarah-Jane Morris's John Martyn project, I hold a fascination - some might say obsession - for the meagre musical connections of the south-west London suburbs in which I grew up. This partly stems from the discovery that Martyn himself was born only a thirty minute walk from the New Malden house where I later sprang to life, a revelation akin to discovering royal blood in my veins.

That discovery gave no indication that there would be more intersections to come. The first - and clearly foremost - came when I met my other half and learned that she not only lived in New Malden (in a house more or less backing on to that in which my grandfather and his siblings were born), but also worked at my first junior school. Bizarrely, too, she grew up in south-east London, where I currently base myself. Then came the revelation that my local Greenwich MP, Matthew Pennycook, also hails from the area and even went to my secondary school, some years behind me, before going up to Oxford (a rare event for Beverley Boys, I can assure you). The next connection in this uncanny sequence, however, was another musical one: via an intimate basement gig one Saturday night in Tufnell Park, over there in that North London, my mate Sean introduced me to the music of singer-songwriter Peter Bruntnell. And, guess what? I discovered that Bruntnell was at Beverley too, albeit a few years ahead of me.

Readers, I will not bore you further (and again) with the other remarkable collection of rock connections to my home area (Clapton, Page, Beck, et al), because Bruntnell is one of two pressing local musical matters to address here. Once described by Rolling Stone, no less, as "one of England's best kept musical secrets", demonstrating customary American understanding of the United Kingdom construct, Bruntnell has, since 1995, delivered a stunning canon of Americana-tinged, bittersweet brilliance. And he's now added to it with a sumptuous new album, King Of Madrid. Incredibly, it's his 13th, which means that the previous 12 have probably passed under your radar over the last 25 years since he released his debut. But if that is so, then you will have missed out on a body of work redolent of one of my favourite periods of musical history, when the canyons of Los Angeles were a vital source of earnest musicianship and hippy ideals, and produced the likes of Jackson Brown, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Gram Parsons and more.

King Of Madrid continues in that rich Americana vein and should, with the right visibility elevate Bruntnell to an entirely different altitude, possessing the kind of hooks, lyrical richness, lusciously strummable guitar work and Bruntnell's gently urgent vocals that wouldn’t be out of place on anything emanating from Laurel Canyon in the late '60s. I’d even go as far as comparing Bruntnell with Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, perhaps not for their denim earnestness, but more for the subtlety of lyrical observation attached to his rooted music. On this release, Bruntnell targets the utter mess Britain is right now, peaking with National Library taking shots at the legacy left behind by David Cameron (including soundbites from the former prime minister), while Memory Hood, London Hood and the album's title track, take clever potshots at the febrile state of the nation.

We stay in the KT postcodes, sort of, and add a very strong touch of Sheffield for the next musical revelation, also brought to me by the aforementioned Sean, whose appreciation of Americana goes unmatched. One spring Sunday morning, seven years ago, Sean sent me a link to a free stream of Richard Hawley's then new album, Standing At The Sky's Edge. Hawley had, like Bruntnell, hitherto passed me by, despite his early Britpop work in the Longpigs and later collaborations with fellow Sheffielder Jarvis Cocker. And yet here, on this particular lazy Sunday morning, lying in bed in my apartment in Paris, I became engulfed completely by Hawley's collection of songs about three families living in Skye Edge, a housing estate in Sheffield's Park Hill district, one of many Hawley has embraced in song. Sky's Edge subsequently turned out to be a new direction, leaving behind the gentle country croons of its predecessors and instead embracing a reverb and distortion-drenched set of psychedelic epics. I listened to nothing else for what seemed like weeks after hearing it. Two weeks after the awful Bataclan attack in Paris, Hawley was the first gig I went to, itself an emotional rollercoaster for everyone inside the Alhambra theatre, barely a fifteen-minute walk away from the terrorist atrocity in November 2015. Hawley's gentle humour and mellifluous songs were, that night, just what Paris needed. A musical arm around the shoulder. Soothing reassurance.

And so it is with a gentler context that the bequiffed and typically double denim-clad Hawley comes to a church in Kingston-upon-Thames, New Malden's 'parent' town, to launch his delicious new record, Further. Noting the "Holy! Holy! Holy!" banner behind him on the apse wall of St. John The Baptist Church (a change of venue from the All Saints Church, which was recently - and surreally - the location of a gig by Jack Bauer himself, Keifer Sutherland), Hawley is soon riffing in his dry South Yorkshire humour, suggesting "Hawley! Hawley! Hawley" as a more suitable slogan.

Even with one semi-accidental F-bomb, he is never disrespectful of the environment, making ample use of the ecclesiastic ambience to enhance the acoustic guitar work of Hawley and his ever-present sidekick Shez Sheridan, as they make their way through an eight-song set that includes new music such as the Beatle-esque Doors, the dreamily shimmering Emilina Says, Galley Girl and its tale of highwayman derring-do, and the utterly winsome My Little Treasures, a song which took Hawley 12 years to write, about two of his late father's drinking buddies. From previous albums Hawley and Sheridan combine wonderfully to produce all-acoustic versions of Sky's Edge and even the glitterball romance of Tonight The Streets Are Ours, returning after the briefest of discreet beer breaks to end with the absolutely mellifluent For Your Lover Give Some Time from the Truelove's Gutter album, a song that, via its bittersweet lyrics, shines the spotlight on Hawley's delicious barrtione.

The set is short and sweet, a promotional opportunity for Kingston's fine emporium Banquet Records as much as a Richard Hawley Gig, but in the church setting, before a largely white middle aged and middle class congregation - Kingston captured in its essence - Hawley wraps yet another soothing arm around the shoulder. The last time was in the tragic aftermath of Paris, almost four years ago. This time, we're in the innocent, perennially untroubling London suburbs, in a residential parish church. The circumstances and location couldn't be more contrasting.

Home on the range: Ray Davies' Americana

It is somewhat ironic that the first new album from Ray Davies since being made a knight of the British realm should commence with the line "I wanna make my home where the buffalo roam". Because for all the wannabe Yankeeism of his contemporaries in the 1960s, Davies and The Kinks remained resolute beacons of England.

Waterloo Sunset is, simply, the most beautiful song ever written about London and a standout entry in a ten-year period of intense creativity in which Davies became England's pop laureate, with wry and often strongly satirical tunes about English life, like Sunny Afternoon, Autumn Almanac, Dead End Street, Dedicated Follower Of Fashion and David Watts, and the oft-overlooked album, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. But within these masterful snapshots of Cool Britannia before the term had ever been coined lie clues as to why Sir Kink has turned his attention to the Land of Opportunity with Americana, his fifth solo album and the first for ten years.

Though, like most of those who made their bones in the '60s pop boom, Davies launched his career under the influence of American rock and roll, Americana - in which he is backed by rootsy Minnesotans, The Jayhawks - takes him on a somewhat sentimental journey through the cultural memes of the You Ess of A. This might sound like tired cliché, and you might be fearing wide-eyed tales of truck stops and roadside diners, but there is a genuinely journalistic, travelogue nature about the 15 tracks on this album, all entirely in keeping with Davies at his storytelling best back in the day.

The narrative is part-observational, part-reflection: Americana, the title track and opener, looks back upon childhood, and Saturday morning Wild West picture shows in North London when "My baby brother and me in the land of the free" would dream of being home on the range but "On that silver screen, 'cos since I was a teen you know I had this dream". This is in the same vein of nostalgia as Ballroom Dancing, his ironic take on Saturday nights out in Muswell Hill, but with a wistful pace slowed delightfully by the countrified backing.

Davies has had an odd relationship with America. At the height of the British invasion The Kinks were denied permits to tour the US by the American Federation of Musicians (the ban has never been properly explained, though a reputation for on- and off-stage antics has been hinted at, even though The Kinks were no worse than anyone else and certainly better than what followed in the '70s...). And then, of course, there was the more recent episode, in January 2004, when Davies was shot in the leg while chasing thieves in New Orleans who'd snatched the his then-girlfriend's handbag. An incident like that might colour one's opinion of a country. But, then, America - even America today - has been an aspiration for so many.

And so, on tracks like The Deal, and its Randy Newman-like view of Los Angeles, or Message From The Road and The Great Highway, Davies performs sketches of America, past and present, from the urban canyons to the open desert roads, touching occasionally on the American dream - more from the pursuit of it, rather than its attraction. Again, these themes have all been covered in some depth before, but with Davies you get a lyric that, though invariably quite simple, is incredibly evocative. And whereas many a non-American musician has tackled these themes in both homage and in parody, Davies does so purely from the viewpoint of wry observation, as if adding semi-sung narration to musical documentaries.

I'd be lying if I said this was Davies' best work, but there is much to endear on Americana, simply because it is Ray Davies (and also for coming with cover art photography that makes buying the two-disc vinyl version worth every penny). That might be a perilous statement to make - no one has a right to greatness just because they have been in their past - but the work here is genuine and fascinating at the same time. And that's good enough for me.