Beau - Palace Of Light

 

Consistently inspired singer songwriter returns with a satirical 15-song set. Modern life may well be rubbish but at least we have Beau to survey it with gentle humour and poetic barbs.

I've always admired artists that are in it for the long haul. There are certain songwriters who stick to their principles and stylistic choices, riding out the changes in fashion, sensibilities and taste that affect the wider musical world. Beau, AKA Trevor Midgley is one of these artists. His latest album is his nineteenth for Cherry Red Records and confirms his status as one of the sharpest satirical songwriters this country has produced. He won't be appearing at Radio One's Big Weekend, neither will he grace the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury this year. But at 79 years of age Beau still has the drive and talent that was evident on his eponymous 1969 debut album (which was the first release on John Peel's Dandelion label don't ya know!)

Palace Of Light is, like Beau's previous albums, a simply recorded affair - just one voice and one guitar (a vintage 1968 Harmony 12-string no less!) It's a contemporary look at modern life and its strange political and cultural climate. The accompanying sense of dissatisfaction and occasional bafflement is best encapsulated in songs such as 'Twenty-Twenty Vision' and 'Cuckoo Land'. Serious subject matter for sure but Beau lays into it all with delicate humour. Similarly smile-raising is opening track 'I Plagiarise Beethoven' where we get an insight into Beau's wide-ranging melodic influences. Other subjects/targets include cultural appropriation, social media, cancel culture, Brexit, identity politics, society's obsession with celebrity, rigid adherence to ideology and more. Also worth looking out for are references to Adele, along with one to Paul McCartney's sheepdog Martha on 'Celebrity Memorabilia'.

He's a pretty decent guitar player too, perhaps no surprise given that he's spent a good 60 years at folk music's coal face. You can take a listen to Palace Of Light via the Spotify player below. It's a good place to start before working your way through his extensive and highly-recommended back catalogue.

http://beausrecordings.blogspot.com/ 

http://www.trevormidgley.com/

 

Interview with Shana Cleveland

 

(This feature first appeared in issue #137 of Shindig! magazine. For the full unpublished interview click over the jump below.)

 

The creation of Shana Cleveland's new album was bookended by life-changing experiences. “It's been a wild ride” she tells Duncan Fletcher

“I was into old blues pickers like Geeshie Wiley, Skip James and Lightnin' Hopkins. I’ve always been a big Fahey fan. There’s a guy who played open mics in Seattle when I lived there named Rick Sabo. I never knew when he would show up, but I would go to places I thought he might and wait. Then when he did stumble in, always in an old trench coat and a bit drunk, and he began playing it felt like I had won the night.” So says Shana Cleveland when asked about early influences. Traces of all these players can be heard on Shana's new album Manzanita, but its dominant shaping forces are her life experiences.

“I wrote all the songs on this album while I was pregnant and in the early months of my son’s life. It was such a psychedelic time! My head was in such a weird place, all flooded with hormones and wonder at the mystery of life. I liked where the songs were going so, I figured it would be cool to see what a whole album written in that surreal state would sound like.” With her husband Will and several musician friends from Seattle, Shana recorded Manzanita in less than a week. The unrehearsed, intuitive arrangements blend with Shana's open-tuned guitar to give the songs an otherworldly watercolour-like quality. It reveals a different side to Shana, who readers may know as vocalist/guitarist in surf band La Luz.

Shortly after completing the album Shana received shock news. “It’s been a wild ride. Around this time last year, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and for a few months following that shocker I really couldn’t create much of anything” she says. Thankfully her treatment proved successful. “This album was done before I got the diagnosis, but I’ve written two albums since then. The intensity and horror of that time led to a lot of contemplation which, in turn, led to a lot of songs.”

While we wait to hear those songs, Manzanita yields an abundance of riches, all imbued with early parenthood's peculiar sense of wonder, and an appreciation of the natural world, inspired in part by Shana and Will moving to rural California. “I write outside most of the time” she says. “I like being immersed in all the little noises - insects, birds, cars, wind, chainsaws ... I feel like I’m able to tap into my subconscious mind without the judgment I might fall into if I was alone with my thoughts in a quiet room. It feels like a collaboration in a way.”

Manzanita is out on March 10 on Hardly Art

decker. - Born To Wake Up

(This review first appeared in issue #87 of Shindig! magazine.)

Royal Potato Family CD/LP

The opening seconds of singer/songwriter Brandon Decker's new record features a sparse and lonely sound collage – footsteps, a drum pulse, chanted drone and the distant howling of wolves. It comes as little surprise to learn he takes much inspiration from his Arizona desert surroundings, coming across at times like a modern day Morricone in search of a film. This ghostly wind-through-the-cacti ambience is best invoked on 'The Garden' with its lyrical echoes of Joni Mitchell's 'Woodstock', and 'The Saint', a bruised but ultimately optimistic emotional ballad.

At the core of Decker's songwriting lies an belief in redemption and the need for spiritual nourishment, but peppered among the intimate loner folk are tracks with a polished indie rock sound. His inner-Springsteen finding an outlet on 'Burnin' Grass' and 'The Matador', both tracks containing stadium-worthy vibes and melodies. Conviction, inner belief and landscape-informed outlook makes this an impressive soul-baring.

Jessica Risker - I See You Among The Stars

(This review first appeared in issue #79 of Shindig! magazine.)

Western Vinyl CD / LP

Empathy is an important part of any songwriter's toolkit, so Jessica Risker's experience as a licensed counsellor has no doubt helped shape a record made for one-on-one listening, and full of sympathy and gentle contemplation. Her latest LP marks a departure from the experimental rhythm and noise of 2016's Big Forever (released under her alias Deadbeat), opting instead for acoustic fingerpicking, almost whispered vocals and ambient beat-less electronic textures.

With a similar openness to Elliott Smith, Vashti Bunyan or Nick Drake, Risker's first-person narratives are rooted in the everyday but are deceptive in their emotional depth. At just over half an hour, I See You Among The Stars is a short but lyrically rich set of songs, so understated that they may struggle to be heard among the clamouring tower of new releases. A shame as it's often the quiet ones who have more to say. Modern folk at its most fragile.

Ryan Martin - Gimme Some Light

Regret, realisation and redemption. Tales from the crossroads of modern masculinity.

Ever since the early '70s, a time referred to by some as “the me decade”, there's always been an array of confessional singer-songwriters in the musical firmament. Call it the Dylan effect. Having ditched the political for the personal in the mid'60s our Bob-ness inspired a generation of (mostly male) musicians to wear hearts on sleeves and encouraging the baring of souls, with each subsequent generation adding a new wave to the genre. Some were bad, many good, and a select few were amazing. So here we are now in the time of #MeToo, a long-overdue watershed moment in gender politics. It's an interesting time for female musicians with lots of great music being made. By extension any male singer-songwriter secure in their own talent should be able to rise to the challenges that the current social and political climate presents.

Ryan Martin is the latest sensitive musician to come to the fore. A Californian currently residing in New York, I doubt Martin would claim to be a political writer, or overly concerned with gender politics for that matter but his latest and second LP Gimme Some Light does capture something of what it means to be a man in today's world. It's as open and honest an LP you're likely to hear all year, with a rare emotional complexity. Rather than the bold declarations, sureties and definite opinions we associated with the age of social media and political bombast, there's nuance, self-doubt and vulnerability. A sense of him saying “hey I may have messed up in the past, I can't promise to be perfect in the future, but I can try to be better.” It's refreshing to hear such honesty.

Martin's back-story is a colourful one involving a traumatic car accident, addiction, subsequent treatment and spells in jail. The dark times inform but don't define his music. Gimme Some Light is infused with the notion of turning things round, steering away from all that's destructive and finding a better place, a better way of being. And the tunes and arrangements are pretty good too! With a similar buffeted and bruised Americana to that of Neil Young and Ryan Adams, Martin's autobiographical songs paint a picture of a man at times down but not out.

'All The Good Men' fades in with a background of ambient white noise before piano and pedal steel lead the way into a song which sets the emotional tone and themes of the album. There's regret but it comes with tempered with realisation. 'Destitute Darlings' is an E-Street Band rocker worthy of The Boss himself, full of passionate street-level romance delivered with bar-band wall of sound. But there are many great songs here, a mix of sparsely arranged ballads and full on rockers, all melodically memorable and from the heart. Gimme Some Light is proof that the future need not be toxic after all.

Click here for Ryan Martin's website.

Click here for Ryan Martin on Twitter.

Click here for Ryan Martin on Facebook.

Clickhere for High Moon Records.

Marvin Powell

(This first appeared in issue #68 of Shindig! magazine.)

Duncan Fletcher finds magic on Merseyside with fragile folk's rising new star.

“I always think songwriting is like getting rid of noise in my head, I never write a physical song, I won't write it down... it's just in my head and I get it out there” explains Marvin Powell when asked about 'Salt', the title track of his debut EP. In person Powell is down to earth and affable, his personality seemingly at odds with the mysterious music he makes. It's pitched somewhere between Vashti Bunyan, Devendra Banhart, Nick Drake and his formative influences of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, but with a sensitivity that's all Powell's own.

Take his song 'China Town' - “Four of us used to live in a big panoramic penthouse flat... from every view, every window there was an iconic Liverpool building - the bombed-out church, the Chinese arch, Paddy's Wigwam. That's where that song comes from, I'm looking down on this changing landscape of the city.” It's sublime songwriting, with Powell drawing parallels between the changing skyline, his inner emotions and the human condition in general.

Alongside the strong lyrics and ethereal vocals, he's also a skilled finger-style guitarist, albeit one to whom the guitar is a means to an end - “It was just something to do. I learnt by watching people. Kinesthetic, is that the word? ...I started writing songs when I learnt three chords... To me it's about the songs. I don't care about the guitar, well I do, but as long you can get your message across in the tunes. It's more about the lyrics and the poetry.”

Powell has honed his artistry playing Liverpool's coffee shops and open mic nights, along with being the “sacrificial folkie” at the city's venues, opening for local and touring bands. With a full length LP already recorded it may not be long before that running order is reversed.

The Salt EP is out now on Skeleton Key.

Miranda Lee Richards - Existential Beast

 

(This review first appeared in issue #68 of Shindig! magazine.)

Invisible Hands CD/LP

There's been a steady stream of records concerned with ecology, corruption and the state of the planet over the last 40 years. What makes this offering from LA-based Miranda Lee Richards so special is its articulate power. Without naming names political leaders are evoked and rebuffed by intelligent poetical argument.

Musically the album draws from several 1970s sources – Laurel Canyon country rock royalty ('Ashes And Seeds'), Joe Boyd's Witchseason productions for Island Records ('Autumn Sun' and 'Oh Raven'), through to the spoken word sections of David Axelrod's Earth Rot (the end section of 'Lucid I Dream'). Subtle use of echo throughout the album adds to the continuity of sound and aids its woozy intoxicating power.

The album's tour de force is saved till the end. Clocking in at 12 minutes, 'Another World' is the most overtly political song, calling out those in power and offering a vision of how things could be. Clever stuff.

Robyn Hitchcock - Robyn Hitchcock

(This review first appeared in issue #66 of Shindig! magazine.)

Yep Roc CD / LP

Lemmy once said a problem of being a living legend is that no one listens to your most recent LPs. Robyn Hitchcock may be the best exception to this rule, with each new LP being essential listening. This eponymous album shows no let up in his knack for heart-on-sleeve lyrics combining childhood memories, skewed observations, compassionate worldviews and juxtapositions of the absurd with the everyday.

Producer Brendan Benson (Raconteurs) brings out a powerpop punch but maintains Hitchcock's left-of-centre edge over the stylistically diverse tracks. From the album opener 'I Want To Tell You What I Want' where Hitchcock states his desire for the future (“world peace, gentle socialismo, no machismo”) through to the Nashville country knees-up of 'I Pray When I'm Drunk' and the Revolver-esque guitar-pop of 'Virginia Woolf' and 'Time Coast'. Best of all is the eastern strings and backwards guitar on 'Autumn Sunglasses'. Thought provoking and essential as ever.

Beau – An Original Thought

Peel favourite Beau marks his 70th birthday with a brand new studio LP.

Almost a year to the day since Beau's previous album Shoeless In The Desert, the ever prolific Norfolk-based songster has a brand new 13-tracker released digitally by the good folks at Cherry Red Records. An Original Thought has all the hallmarks of a classic Beau album; the every present Harmony twelve-string guitar backing, lyrics that veer from the wry, to comic, and to poignant, along with the astute and compassionate commentary on society's foibles.

This time round the subject matter is, if anything, even more varied. There are the big themes of religion, patriotism, war and peace (The Thinking Of God, A Peace That's Bad). Politicians and tabloid journalism are also subject to Beau's critical eye (Skeleton's Dance), but there's light relief and celebration of the good in humanity too, our ingenuity and ability to invent (Everything's Possible), showbiz comebacks (The Trotter Sisters). It's all done in a manner we've come to expect from such a talented songwriter, the songs are funny but never frivolous, playful but never without a point. Amazingly the album was written in just 2 weeks, in what Beau describes as “... my most intense writing phase ever, even going back to my twenties!

Famously championed by John Peel, Beau featured on the DJ's Dandelion label back in the Perfumed Garden era. Of course the musical climate has changed massively in the intervening decades. Admirably Beau has stuck to the basic principles of what makes his music truthful and honest, rather than indulging in fads and fashions. His songs are recorded without unnecessary studio trickery or technology led instrumentation. All the songs are based on having something to say rather than filling out an album to push “the single”. This might make him something of an anomaly in the current climate but it's something that should be applauded. More power to his elbow!

If you're unfamiliar with Beau's work and want to find out more, check out his previous albums ShoelessIn The Desert, Fly The Bluebird and Twelve Strings To The Beau.

Clickhere for more on Beau.