Willem Maker AGAPEO

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Long time coming this review. I was lucky enough to get a digital download of Maker’s album months ago but as an old time hands on product type of guy it got lost within the myriad folders that populate my desktop. It was a chance re listening of Maker’s album New Moon Hand which reminded me that that there was some more gold awaiting to be mined. New Moon Hand was a tremendous mixture of Bonnie Prince Billy and Tom Waits (in a nutshell) that gained additional weight from the backstory of Maker having to retire from music making for some time after being poisoned by industrial effluent in his hometown. Listening to AGAPAO however gives no indication that this man is a victim. Instead he builds on the previous album’s comparisons and adds a scintillating Herculean holler worthy of Captain Beefheart.
Maker plays most of the instruments here himself, delving into swampy blues, twisted backporch sermons and gravelled voiced prophets. He summons up ghosts, old and new, Howling Wolf and John Fahey could sit comfortably in these grooves. His howling voice on the mandolin laced opener Changlin’ sets the scene and culminates in the pulverising Gulf of Mexico. I am I is a blistering boogie that Canned Heat would have proud of. Revival shreds the likes of the White Stripes with its sloppy guitar and wheezy harmonica. All through the album Maker inhabits the character of the downtrodden, and he plays downtrodden music but there is a sure sense of righteousness in the fire and brimstone delivery,. An Alabama apostle to be sure but in the end a one man band that buzzes and burns.

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I am I

Joshua

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Confronted by the anonymous spectral faces framed on the sleeve of this CD it was comforting to read that JǒŞhǔA is a side project of the great Joe Cassady and the West End Sound. Featuring Cassady himself and his superb guitar player Shu Nakamura we were ready for another dose of literate and wry observations delivered with aplomb in a country folk style as in last year’s The Chymical Vegas Wedding“ However the PR blurb stating they had “got a bit bored by what they were doing and did something else” should have alerted me. JǒŞhǔA don’t deliver hummable melodies or toe tapping tunes, instead they delve into the dark recesses of the soul with a piledriver percussive sound and distorted voices that reek of danger and doom. Think of Krautrock, Tom Waits, Johnny Dowd, Harry Partch, add in some Lee Hazelwood, Beat poetry, Tibetan bells and top it off with a dusting of Joujukan master musicians and you’re in the territory this pair inhabit. In fact they say it better themselves describing their influences as “garbage cans, screaming children, half-empty bottles, half-full bottles, deer antlers, tambourines, mortal flesh, pots, pans, vocal chords, squeaky chairs, sheets of paper, the words on the paper, bells, whistles, the whole bag of chips, etc.”
With such a smorgasbord of sounds it’s a tribute to the pair of them that the album is a bit of a triumph. See-sawing between spoken word poems accompanied by a jangled cacophony and more intimate and tender spooky ballads all is weird in here. In Thee O Lord which opens the album is a trance like invocation that recalls the opiate nightmares of William Burroughs, Unstarted Symphony is a whirling percussive dervish and Dear Words throbs like a heart beating to burst. By comparison Don’t Let them Hurt You sounds almost tender despite the surreal sci-fi imagery. It’s a genuine surprise to find a Christmas song towards the end of the album. Christmas Eve 2012 is jaunty with a faux country feel but listen to the lyrics and you soon release that you’re still in JǒŞhǔA land.

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In Thee O Lord

Alexander Wolfe. Morning Brings A Flood.

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Although this album has been kicking around since last year it’s getting a push as one of the tracks, Song For The Dead has bagged a place as the theme song for a new BBC comedy, Whites. Good enough reason to wheel it out and enjoy its eclectic mix of English pastoral and baroque rock settings. Wolfe’s story is fairly unique in itself. Full name Alexander Gordon de Menthon, a scion of a French aristocrat he funded this album through selling a family heirloom, a Rembrandt sketch, not often that happens.
Anyway, the result was an album that pulls in influences that include the likes of Tom Waits and Neil Young but the overall influences are English artists such as Paul Weller and even Peter Skellern. The Weller trick of fusing pastoral sounds with frighteningly good turbo charged guitar is given a good airing on the second song, Lazybones while the lengthy closer Stuck Under September is a close cousin to The Jam’s English Rose. The mellow Till Your Ship Comes In has shades of Nick drake particularly in the string accompaniment. While the overall feel of the album is of a wintry melancholia there are moments such as Teabags in Ashtrays which has wonderfully eccentric feel with Hawaiian guitar and merry go round circus music blending into a dizzying mix. The song that the Beeb is using, Song For The dead struts proudly sounding like a long lost Kinks song although Wolfe’s estuary English might not be his everyday voice one suspects. There are other joys, Empty Morning is a mournful lament with brass accompaniment reminiscent of Peter Skellern while This Submarine brings to mind folk rock experiments by the likes of Roy Harper and Michael Chapman from many moons ago.
A minor classic that might enjoy resurgence thanks to the BBC.

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