Song, by Toad

[Sunday Supplements this week are brought to you by Campfires & Battlefields, to whom I owe an enormous apology due to the fact that I have been sitting on this post for ages, interrupted first by Christmas, then disorganisation, then ineptitude... you get the picture.]

Olenka & the Autumn Lovers are pretty special if you ask me. They’re all the rage in London, Ontario. Olenka Krakus is the mastermind, the singer, the composer, the lyricist, the guitarist, the accordionist (sometimes), the glockenspielist. She came to Canada from Poland, and her songs are a compelling blend of Eastern European and North American influences. She sings with smoky tension, mostly in English, but sometimes in the Polish or French of her youth. She tells poignant stories of handsome soldier boys, fleets of loud frightening machines made of scrap iron, and sweet-faced children in the Warsaw breadlines. I wish I had heard her long ago.

Olenka also appears to have a wide circle of talented friends. The Autumn Lovers are a revolving cast of characters, but they all can flat-out play. Apart from Olenka’s guitar there’s violin, viola, cello, mandolin, lap steel, accordion, clarinet, saxophone, upright bass, percussion instruments of all kinds, glockenspiel, triangle, banjo, bottles knocked against wood, snapping fingers, and truly moving harmony vocals. They make a clatter that would do Tom Waits proud, providing an expansive counterpoint for Olenka’s intimate tales.

So far Olenka & The Autumn Lovers have released one self-titled full-length record and two EPs, all of which were released in 2008. Of the tracks here, Soldier’s Waltz and When We Were Children are taken from the full-length while Papillon comes from the Papillonette EP, which has a lovely lonesome country vibe. All three records are available for purchase at CD Baby, and the full-length is available for digitial download at Zunior.com. You really owe it to yourself to get this. Apparently recording has begun for the sophomore full-length as well, and a 2010 release is envisioned, which is immensely good news. These songs really speak for themselves. Enjoy.

Olenka & The Autumn Lovers – Soldier’s Waltz

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Olenka & The Autumn Lovers – When We Were Children

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Olenka & The Autumn Lovers – Papillon

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[Sunday Supplements this week are brought to you by Campfires & Battlefields, to whom I owe an enormous apology due to the fact that I have been sitting on this post for ages, interrupted first by Christmas, then disorganisation, then ineptitude... you get the picture.]

I don’t think I’ve ever heard (or heard of) a band from Montana before, so I felt a real thrill of discovery when I happened upon Wartime Blues during one of my recent forays into the darker corners of myspace. As you might expect from a Montana band, they are fresh-faced, flannel-clad, mostly, and sincere. There are eight of them, which is roughly six percent of the total Montana population, and I have no idea where they came from, but . . . DAMN.

The style is riffed-up, open-handed Americana, with accoustic and electric guitar, bass, and drums complemented by lots of good banjo, mandolin, cello, and keys of all sorts. It frequently rocks without apology, but just as often shows a restrained tension that sounds like it would translate really well live. Fans of Wilco, Band of Horses, Balletesque by The Young Republic , or Willard Grant Conspiracy will feel more than comfortable in their company, I think. The singing and songwriting duties go to Nate Hegyi, a southpaw guitarist with a real gift for hooks and a gravelly, powerful voice that belies his apparent youth. In fact, the whole band seem to be quite young, but they play with real maturity and sensitivity, like they’ve been doing this for ages.

Wartime Blues just released their debut full-length, entitled Doves & Drums, and you can find it here for the American equivalent of a fiver. A steal. The first tune below is the title track from that album. The second is a brooding slice of gorgeousness called Harelip, which comes from a powerful 2008 session they recorded for Snow Ghost, a really interesting independent music service based in Whitefish, Montana, which gives up-and-coming bands access to state-of-the-art recording equipment and spaces. The rest of the songs from that session are available for download here, and there’s a video there as well for one of their best songs, called Saul Whitewater. Tell me what you think.

Wartime Blues – Doves & Drums

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Wartime Blues – Harelip (Snow Ghost Session)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Website |Buy |SnowGhost Session

[The internet has a habit of making friends of strangers and I guess I would have to describe Campfires & Battlefields as my best friend-I've-never-met.  He is one of the longest standing readers and commenters of this blog, and has written another two fine Sunday Supplement posts for us this week.  Cheers C&B.]

To me modern German music has always been about the monosyllabic pioneers of Krautrock.  Can.  Faust.  Neu!   Or perhaps the ear-shattering crunch of Einsturzende Neubauten’s strategies against architecture.   Brilliant stuff, but forbidding too; and sometimes a little too Baader-Meinhof for my bourgeois ass.   But in the last year or so I’ve discovered three people who’ve made me seriously rethink my assumptions about German music, and this post is about those three.

The first is Haruko. Her real name is Susanne Stanglow, and while she looks from her photos to be about 14 years old, her music comes from an old soul.  She first came to my attention a month or so ago, when DC played one of her gorgeous songs on The Waiting Room.  She has a record out called Wild Geese, but she hasn’t received nearly enough blog love.  Yet.  Regular readers of Song by Toad will recognize her style, and no one will be terribly surprised to find Alela Diane and Mariee Sioux among her myspace “top friends,” although I also hear quite a bit of Porlolo in her voice.  Lovely melodies are present in abundance, and the recording has a consciously woody, crackly feel, like it was recorded on a big stone hearth in front of a warm fire.  There’s also a dreamy, child-like innocence to the lyrics and delivery that I find particularly moving, especially on the stunning The Mountain Adventure, which forms a sort of centerpiece for the record. Comparisons to Joanna Newsom will inevitably be made, and musically there may be something to that, but fortunately Haruko does not sound like a cat being strangled.  Haruko’s record is now available on vinyl, so get in line.

Haruko – Welcome To Loveland

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Haruko – The Mountain Adventure

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Next up is Andre Daners, who records as My Laundry Life.  My Laundry Life is all about late-80s and early-90s bedroom guitar pop in the fine tradition of Postcard Records and Sarah Records.  I first heard him back in late 2008, when Sons and Guns was released as a split single on the terrific Cloudberry Records.  I was completely hooked then, and I’m still hooked. Some people just seem to have an intuitive understanding of what the perfect, pure pop song should sound like. In early 2009 My Laundry Life came out with his debut full-length, called The Art of Science, on Vollwert Records in Berlin, which has recently emerged as sort of the “European Cloudberry.”  The best points of reference for My Laundry Life’s sound are probably The Go-Betweens or The Field Mice, which ain’t a bad place to start.  Apparently there’s a new My Laundry Life record in the works, entitled How To Wallow In Shame, and the preview tracks on his myspace are really promising.  I defy you to listen to these tunes without bobbing your head.

My Laundry Life – Sons and Guns

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

My Laundry Life – Sunday’s Best

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Last up is Sibylle Baier, who is both old and new.  In the late 60s and early 70s Sibylle Baier was an aspiring folk singer and actress in Germany, and she evidently appeared in one of Wim Wenders’ early films.  Between 1970 and 1973 she wrote a few dozen songs at home and recorded them on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, purely for her own edification I guess.  Life then intervened, as it will, and she moved to the States with her husband, where she chose to focus on raising a family.  Fast forward 30 years, when Sibylle’s enterprising son starts handing out CD versions of his Mom’s old reel-to-reel recordings as family gifts.  Somehow one of these CDs wound up in the hands of J. Mascis, who in turn alerted the good folks at Orange Twin Records in Athens, Georgia, current home of Neutral Milk Hotel and Elf Power among others.  In 2006 Orange Twin released Sibylle Baier’s recordings as a full-length called Colour Green, and it’s a complete revelation.   Quiet, smoky vocals over a gently strummed guitar, as if she fears waking the children but is nonetheless compelled to get her ideas down on tape before they slip away.  It’s like Nico if she weren’t a junkie. Magnificent.

Sibylle Baier – I Lost Something In The Hills

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Sibylle Baier – Forgett

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[The internet has a habit of making friends of strangers and I guess I would have to describe Campfires & Battlefields as my best friend-I've-never-met.  He is one of the longest standing readers and commenters of this blog, and has written another two fine Sunday Supplement posts for us this week.  Cheers C&B.]

This lot first caught my attention because they take their name from a character in the “Port William Fellowship” novels of the American novelist and poet Wendell Berry, one of my favorites.  At its best, Berry’s writing is thrifty and deeply rooted in a sense of community, like his characters.   It’s an example that Jayber Crow the band has taken to heart.

Jayber Crow is two guys, Pete Nelson and Zach Hawkins.  Apparently they became friends in Tanzania during their university days but they come from Minnesota or thereabouts, and their songs evoke the prairies, rivers, and big skies of the rural American Midwest.  It’s a simple formula.  Fiercely strummed guitars, mandolin, banjo, some harmonica, stomping feet, clapping hands, a pair of good pipes, and melodies melodies melodies.  I picked up their full-length record called Two Short Stories back in the Spring (they have an EP too, called The Farmer and the Nomad), and I enjoyed it straight away, but for some reason it got a bit lost in the shuffle for a while.  I rediscovered it a few weeks back, though, and now that autumn is upon us it’s taken a firm hold.  To everything there is a season.  This is woody music, with plenty of dirt under its nails.  Anyhow, my descriptive powers fail, so I’ll just say that I really really like it and then drop the names of some groups they remind me of.  Neutral Milk Hotel.  The Rural Alberta Advantage.  The Avett Brothers.  There.

Now listen, and then go buy their CDs, which are available on their website.

Jayber Crow – St. Anthony

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Jayber Crow – The Limited Voice of the American Crow

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[This week's Sunday Supplement has been very kindly written by perhaps my oldest (and oldest) reader, Campfires & Battlefields.  C&B has emailed me more good music suggestions than pretty much anyone, being the first to alert me to Samamidon, O'Death, Fleet Foxes (okay, we'll forgive him that one) The Felice Brothers and quite a few more, so hopefully we can persuade him to do a monthly column - sort of a Letter From America sort of thing.  Thanks C&B.]

A few weeks back these hallowed pages were given over to iniquity in the form of The Funkcast, where Callum from Meursault faced the unenviable task of persuading Matthew to relax and shake his clenched boo-tay, if only for an hour or so.  I, for one, was inspired, because I really like funk.   I’m not an expert or anything, but I have listened to a lot of this type of music, and I’ve been listening to it a great deal lately.  So I thought I’d take this opportunity to explore the genre a little bit, with an eye to spreading the word about some of the newer stuff that’s out there.

There’s actually quite a global neo-funk “movement” going on at present, and its purveyors have been coming out with some remarkable stuff over the last few years.  In my opinion some of these records tread dangerously close to Acid Jazz or Trip-Hop.  But at its best, the funk renaissance hearkens back to the Afro-beat assault of Fela Kuti, the dark heavy funk of Miles Davis’ early ‘70s output, or the Ethio Jazz arrangements of Mulatu Astatqe, whose recordings from the late 1960s and early 1970s have recently come to prominence after being featured on the brilliant Ethiopiques series from Buda Musique.

It seems like the center of the universe for modern funk is in New York City, where Daptone Records has its headquarters.  Daptone is home to Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, who even some of you poor pallid Scotsmen might have heard of, as well as other great groups like Budos Band, Sugarman 3, and the Menahan Street Band , whose tune Make the Road by Walking was heavily sampled by Jay-Z on Roc Boys (And the Winner Is) from the American Gangster album.

The movement extends far beyond New York, though, and far beyond the States for that matter.  The UK’s Freestyle Records produces solid funk by artists from as far afield as New Zealand (Nathan Haines), Australia (Cookin’ On 3 Burners), and Israel (The Apples), while also providing a home for good English groups like Lack of Afro.   Actually, some of my favorite neo-funk records have been made in Germany by outfits like The Poets of Rhythm and Karl Hector & The Malcouns, and Holland has also made a great deal of noise with the Lefties Soul Connection.

It’s not indie rock, that’s for damn sure, and it’s not folk rock.  Actually, it’s not really the sort of thing that I hear on music blogs very often at all, although I haven’t done much digging to be honest, so there may well be good blogs out there that feature this stuff.  But I thought it might be a nice change of pace, and I think there’s a rich seam of mucis being made in this style right now.  So explore if you want to.  Here’s a couple of new tunes that I particularly like, and also a couple of old tunes that show where this music gets its roots.

Budos Band – Chicago Falcon

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Karl Hector & The Malcouns – Sahara Swing

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The Apples — Kol Hayom Bahalal

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Mulatu Astatqe – Yekermo Sew

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Wallias Band – Muziqawi Silt

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[This week's Sunday Supplement has been very kindly written by perhaps my oldest (and oldest) reader, Campfires & Battlefields.  C&B has emailed me more good music suggestions than pretty much anyone, being the first to alert me to Samamidon, O'Death, Fleet Foxes (okay, we'll forgive him that one) The Felice Brothers and quite a few more, so hopefully we can persuade him to do a monthly column - sort of a Letter From America sort of thing.  Thanks C&B.]

I am enjoying this record way more than I should.  What we have here is a “concept” album about cricket, written and performed by Neil Hannon (from The Divine Comedy) and Thomas Walsh (from Pugwash).  What the fuck?  I know nothing about cricket.  Nothing.  I also know nothing about either the Divine Comedy or Pugwash.  I think I might’ve heard one Divine Comedy song in my life, and I’m pretty certain I’ve never heard anything by Pugwash.   Yet I cannot stop listening.

I first heard the Duckworth Lewis Method about three weeks ago, when DaveyH from The Ghost of Electricity posted a song.  Since then it’s become a strange obsession.  I’ve been thinking about why I like it so much, and the obvious answer is the melodies.  I can’t remember hearing a better set of tunes in ages.  It’s got touches of XTC, the Kinks, and even Robert Wyatt in his more tuneful moments.  That counts for a lot.  Every song swings.  But there’s something else at work that really sets this record apart for me.  A sweetness.   It’s by turns wistful (Mason On The Boundary, The Nightwatchman), comical (Jiggery Pokery, Meeting Mr. Miandad), nostalgic (Gentlemen and Players, Flatten the Hay, Rain Stops Play), and ironic (The Age of Revolution, Test Match Special), but never cynical or sarcastic.  The songs glow with a real fondness for the sport and an affection for its personalities and archetypes.  It’s a shameless authenticity that I find poignant, even if I have no idea what they’re on about half the time.  Sheer aural prozac.

Adding to the appeal of this record is its ephemeral  quality.  The band broke up a few weeks ago, just as I was discovering them, so there’ll be no more Duckworth Lewis Method.  No gigs.  Just 12 perfect pop songs.  This is one of my favorites of the year.

The Duckworth Lewis Method – Mason On The Boundary

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The Duckworth Lewis Method – Meeting Mr. Miandad

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Website | More mp3s |Buy from Amazon

Malcolm Holcombe is pretty much a legend. In the mid-nineties he emerged — already mature –from the mountains of western North Carolina to critical acclaim in country and folk music circles. He has produced a new record every 5 years or so since then, and he’s spent time on the road with some prime talent, including Wilco and Merle Haggard. By all accounts his live performances are truly intense, but thus far I’ve never had the pleasure. He looks and sounds like an Ent from Lord of the Rings, with a face like gnarled tree roots draped in moss and a voice like John Prine with throat cancer. He’s basically a sinister cross-breeding of Guy Clark and Tom Waits. Interested? Thought so.

To be honest, Holcombe’s past records have suffered a bit from excessively shiny Nashville production. Too straight-laced; too much technology. For the proper effect he really needs to be recorded drunk in a barn with a banjo and a big sleepy hound dog at his feet. Gratefully, the solution has been found. In 2007 Holcombe went home to Asheville, NC, and recorded a rugged 5-song EP on Echo Mountain Records called “Wager” with producer Ray Kennedy, who has had great success in the recent past producing records by Steve Earle and Ray Davies.

Now this is more like it. On “I Feel Like a Train” Holcombe sounds like, erm, a train, huffin’ and puffin’ through the Blue Ridge Mountains in a haze of coal-smoke. Or perhaps a dirty old man? Either way, I approve. Actually, this EP was released as a teaser for his new full-length, called “Gamblin’ House,” also released on Echo Mountain. The song “Evelyn,” posted below, appears on both the EP and the full-length, and it’s just a romper stomper.  Holcombe actually just wrapped up a brief European tour that took him to Ireland and the UK, and if anybody reading this had a chance to see him I’d love to get your impressions.

So this is my last post, and Matthew will be back tomorrow I guess. Thanks for listening. In the words of the immortal Casey Kasem, “keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars.” How one is supposed to reach the stars without lifting one’s feet from the ground is something of a mystery, but Casey has always been an enigma, god bless ‘im.

Cheers.

Malcolm Holcombe – Evelyn
Malcolm Holcombe – I Feel Like a Train

Website | More mp3s | Buy Malcolm’s stuff direct from him

Karli Fairbanks is having a yard sale and everything must go! Including apparently her brother’s clothes. That’s right, she’s selling her house and most of her possessions and is about to embark on the peripatetic journey of the itinerant musician (itinerant in the “bohemian rover” sense, not in the “moth-eaten vagrant” sense). Scary, yes, but I predict great things.

Karli is from the Pacific Northwest corner of the United States, but (gasp!) not from Portland. She is in fact a native and citizen of Spokane, Washington, which is situated only a stone’s throw from the Idaho and Montana borders. I asked her about the “scene” up in Spokane, and apparently the place is blooming with singer-songwriters these days, and there are plenty of places to play, so perhaps taking up a musical life isn’t quite the roll of the dice that it might otherwise be.

Anyhow, I found Karli’s music on myspace, and when I first heard her my reaction was complete shock. From her pictures she looks like a little sprite of a thing, but I can assure you that girlfren’ has some pipes, people. Such an incredibly evocative, soul-stirring voice, which she accompanies beautifully with a delicately strummed banjo or guitar. If there’s anything better in this life than a pretty woman playing a banjo I haven’t heard it, unless perhaps it’s a pretty woman playing an accordion. And hey! She plays accordion too. Is there anything she can’t do?  Just achingly gorgeous.  I’ve been listening to her music incessantly for the last week or so, and I hear echoes of Samantha Crain (she just keeps coming up, doesn’t she?), Ghost Bees, whose “ghostly, spectral folk tales” were reviewed by Matthew back in March, and perhaps even a bit of Pittsburgh’s own Emily Rodgers.  Yes. That’s right.  I just name-dropped.  But sometimes you just gotta.

Karli has a splendid full-length called “Bitter Blue” out that you can buy through the link below, and the record is also available for digital download on Amazon. The two tracks posted here are from that record. And she also has a 4-song EP that she’s been kind enough to make available for free download here.

If you can’t get to the yard sale at least buy the record. I’m so happy to have found this.

Karli Fairbanks – Take Me Home
Karli Fairbanks – Canyons

Website | MySpace | Buy from CDBaby

I like The everybodyfields, I really do, but if I’m honest I have to admit that I’ve struggled a bit. They come from Tennessee and they play a very pretty brand of country music, with echoes of the “grievous angel” tradition of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris or, more recently, of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Actually the male lead singer, a demented looking feller with bushy side-whiskers named Sam Quinn, has a voice that sometimes resembles Rawlings’ quite strikingly. At other times, alas, his voice sounds more like Lindsey Buckingham’s, and if there’s one thing I will not tolerate it’s people walking around sounding like Lindsey fucking Buckingham. Don’t get me wrong. I respect the Right Honorable Mr. Buckingham and I have no doubt he was a tiger in his youth, but when I hear his voice today — after so many years of exposure on MOR “Classic Rock” radio – I can’t help but think of erectile dysfunction. If this is a weakness peculiar to myself, then feel free to take it with a grain of salt.

At any rate, The everybodyfields have several important things going for them. They are signed to the superb Ramseur Records for one thing, making them labelmates of The Avett Brothers and the brilliant newcomer Samantha Crain. They also play beautifully, and Sam Quinn and female singer/guitarist Jill Andrews sometimes concoct truly spine-tingling vocal harmonies.  Jill Andrews in particular has a top notch voice that reminds me of Sally Ellyson’s from Hem.  She does most of the singing on “Lonely Anywhere,” which I’ve posted below and for which I have nothing but praise. “Tuesday” is primarily a Sam Quinn vehicle and it has some really excellent moments as well, especially when the fiddle and pedal steel hit the fan at about the 1:30 point.

What has troubled me a bit about this music is its very prettiness. I’ve largely gotten over it, but at first I really couldn’t detect much of an “edge” to their sound that differentiated it in my mind from the hosts of other competent, but not necessarily stirring, musicians out there.  For example, when I listen to Gillian Welch I immediately discern a tension and spontaneity that I don’t hear to the same extent in The everybodyfields’ studio output.  It’s sometimes almost too lovely, if you get my drift, or too clean.  Actually, they’ve posted a few live tracks on their myspace, and to my ear these tunes have a greater immediacy than most of the songs on “Nothing Is Okay,” so perhaps it’s just a matter of the band being more of a live experience.  Matthew and Mrs. Toad will be able to judge this better than I because The everybodyfields are scheduled to perform at pickathon in Portland at the beginning of August, and I understand that our friendly neighborhood amphibian will be in attendance. If he can hear any music over the sound of his own booze-fueled retching (Portland is known not just for its music, but also for its numerous excellent local brews) I’ll be interested to get his thoughts.

Anyhow, you can judge for yourselves.

The everybodyfields – Lonely Anywhere
The everybodyfields – Tuesday

Website | More mp3s | Buy the Album

Andrew Taylor is a lovely fellow from Norwich. I discovered his music on myspace some time ago through his connection to another group called The Challenge of Feral Green, who toured with Catherine Feeny and Jacob Golden a year or so ago. I think they even came to Edinburgh. Anyhow, the pure grace of Andrew’s voice just floored me as soon as I heard it. It reminded me of someone then, and it still does, but I’ve thought and thought and I can’t put my finger on it. There’s a sweetness and reserve to the singing that calls to mind Iain Matthews and Plainsong in their more bucolic moments, or perhaps Red House Painters or Espers.

I don’t suggest that this music is re-writing the rules because it’s not. Nor do I think it was meant to. I suppose the songs fit into the English pastoral folk tradition, at least in terms of the melodies and song structure if not the lyrical content. But then again, what the hell do I know about the English pastoral folk tradition?  Fuck all, that’s what.  But I know what I like.  Let’s just say that this is pretty much just Andrew and a guitar, with some keyboard washes and effects thrown in for emphasis now and again, and it’s gorgeous. Plenty enough to be getting on with if you ask me.

After hearing his songs for a few days on myspace I decided to get in touch and make arrangements to buy his record, called “The Inside of a Mirror.” As it turns out, I am a wise wise man. And fortunately for the “listening public,” this record–which was actually recorded back in 2005 or thereabouts–has now become a bit easier to acquire because Andrew is selling them on his myspace for £10. The first two tracks posted here are from that record, and if after listening to them you can wipe away the tears and pull yourselves together long enough to type in your credit card number I strongly encourage you to do so.  Also, Andrew’s posted a splendid new song for download on his myspace–from an as yet unnamed “forthcoming album”–and I’ve taken the liberty of posting it here as well.  For those who want to dig deeper yet, I’ll just mention that Andrew is a prolific and versatile fellow, and that he’s recorded some very interesting acoustic electronica, both as a solo artist and as member of band called the24thofjune. Check them out.

Now go forth and do good.

Andrew Taylor – It’s Hot Enough
Andrew Taylor – Love Is Pain
Andrew Taylor – What We Were Looking For

MySpace (Buy the Album Here)