Currently based in San Francisco, MATTHEW EDWARDS pays tribute to his roots with The Small Heath Book Of The Dead (Too Good To Be True) charting hardships, lost friends and mythic landscape variously accompanied by Isaac Bonnell on keys and electric guitar, drummer Paul Comaskey, Daniel Fabricant on upright bass. Tom Heyman on pedal steel, percussionist Andres Reyes Gomes, Karina Denike on backing vocals and Charith Premawardhana and Diane Grubbe on viola and woodwind, respectively.
The John Betjeman Blues (“Disheveled, dyslexic, dirty and damned/We couldn’t get on so we started a band/I played the Heretic harmonium/And all of the cool kids thought we were dumb”) opens in a claustrophobic bluesy rock mood, again vocally sounding like a fusion of Bowie and Roy Harper, then, Angeline Morrison on backing vocals and pedal steel keening, Old Albion is a slow walking country-coloured number about antipathy (“There’s nazis in the shopping mall/So put the kettle on…we’ve hung up our principles on the washing line…all along I think we’ve known what’s wrong/But we’ll sit in our bedrooms and put some records on”).
A brief acoustic and pedal steel number, New English Library (publisher of such counter culture books as Chopper, Suedehead and Mama) marks a furtive budding sexual awakening through the pages of books and nudie magazines , declaring “from Geoffrey Chaucer to these annuals of savagery/Each page is delightful, deliciously doomed/Look out world I’m arriving there soon”.
A woozy swayalong The Redgraves presumably has nothing to do with the acting dynasty (unless a reference to Vannesa and her brother’s anti-war political activism) but the line lifted from to the satirical military protest song Bless ‘Em All hints at it being about a veteran with PTSD (“He’s been drinking since Christmas 2004/As it helps with the tyrants, it helps with the bores”).
Another bluesy Bowie-esque strummer, Bad Timing is another about someone with a fucked up life (“He married well but they had bad timing…and it followed them around…a slow divorce and his bad timing/And he knew it all along”). Katie Chan on saxophone, the clipping percussion-driven title track nods to the punk era with lyrics that namecheck iconic venues (the Jester, The Jug of Ale, The Nightingale, The Viaduct) and “the sound of life underground” embodied in such clique local fashion legends as “Jane and Patty and Mike and Carol/All of them dressed in immoral apparel”.
Haunted by the ghosts of Sgt Pepper, Experimental Theatre is wry lament about losing a girlfriend to an avant garde art troupe and the narrator developing an existential crisis as a consequence , so take a bow if you recognised Jarre, BS Johnson and Romain Gary as cult artist who came to tragic ends.
Moving with a Latin sway and woodwind frills, Harriet High is basically a love song (“I’m sick of them looking through you/So come to bohemia with me”) thought how romantic running away to Dolgellau in Wales is open to debate.
It ends with the barroom piano boogie and boxing-themed metaphor of the lyrically tumbling speak-sing Matthew Edwards vs Himself (“A title fight for the middleweight belt…so, take a seat at ringside/Because the only one that’s losing is me/It’s Matthew Edwards Vs the past/A brighter lad of working class”). As musically accessible and engaging as it is often lyrically obscure, its been described as “diaristic glam-folk with a strong emotional core and compelling narrative bent”. Seems fair.
Titled for the iconic Birmingham landmark, BONFIRE RADICALS are in fine fettle for their third full-length self-released album Spaghetti Junction (with their trademark mix of mesmerisingly chaotic but highly discipled instrumentals that see a wide spectrum of world music styles colliding.
Sporting the Eastern European colours you’d expect from the title, Pete Churchill and clarinetist Katie Stevens knocked out Balkan Replacement Service over a lunch hour between workshops, the track featuring Pete’s new acquisition of a cherry-wood Italian accordion (apparently bought with money earned from his solar panels). The shortest track at just over three minutes, it opens with a brief drone before rattling along like a bus driven by a dervish, taking bends on two wheels and, taking a break from Ilias Lintzos’s clattering drums, briefly calling into the depot for a woodwind whirlygig solo.
For Im Tocht Lang Tae See Dee, violinist Sarah Farmer (her last album with the band and now replaced by Emily Dawe|) gathers together three traditional tunes from Shetland's fiddle tradition, Dus Bun Lang Awa Am Im Tocht Lang Tae See Dee., an untitled reel learned from Kevin Anderson of Fiddler’s Bid and the traditional-styled Willie Be Wast Da Loch composed by Gideon Stove.
After that little mouthful, the longest track is the tempo and style swerving six-minute plus Northern Lights which, to quote the notes is a Norwegian/Swedish sandwich with an afrobeat, South African highlife and Ethiopian inspired 6/8 groove filling peppered by a Sub-Saharan clave..
World music buffs will of course know that Der Heyser Bulgar is a 19th-century dance tune made famous by clarinetist Naftule Brandwein, here repped by Katie, though back then nobody ever thought to flesh it out with a doom-rock middle section and a closing accordion-led wonky waltz.
Michelle Holloway’s recorder dancing along and the bass pulsing, Green Fingered Hector has its origins in guitarist Emmar Reading’s first gig with the band were she realised to her horror that she had no idea how to play the next track on the set list and comes with a virtually Wagnerian wordless vocal, the percussion freaking out on either side.
Originally commissioned by composer Sid Peacock for his Surge Orchestra, Krims Krams Rŭčenica lets Katie loose for her take on a traditional Bulgarian waltz, Krim Krams a colloquial German term meaning "knick-knacks" " and Rŭčenica that aforementioned waltz, this version opening on melancholic notes and climaxing with a drum n bass finale.
North East Brazil is the port of call for Mara anchored by Maracatu rhythms, Katie providing the drum clattering opening Jig For Mini in response to some guitar loop pedal noodling by Emma and the second, Bog an Lochan, one of the earliest strathspeys in the Highland manuscripts, giving percussion its head before closing with The Ivy League Set taken from the repertoire of 19th century piper Phillip Goodman with Katie on whistle.
Like the opener, the title track was the result of a Katie and Pete dare, resulting in a lurching frolic lifted from an unperformed tune he’d written for a Sardinian band they’d once both been in and comes with a mock-opera choir singing the title before it seems to come to a wheezing halt only to burst back to life with a brief flurry of da da das
It ends with another local nod with the bonus track, the only actual song, the slow swaying, phone lights aloft, Birmingham Rain, an American folk-tinged hometown heartbreak anthem (“Driver stops by me, I get in by his side/What can I tell him don’t want to explain/Tell him my tears are just Birmingham Rain”) written by local singer-songwriter Barbara Norden, wistfully sung by Michelle backed by the Choir with No Name Birmingham, the city's choir for people affected by homelessness of which she’s a volunteer, Pete the musical director and Katie playing in its band. Well worth navigating.
One of John Napier’s many music projects, an angular punk-funk trio with Olly Forrester and Andy Kearney also behind the head sacs, THE LINE MANAGERS return with New Lines Of Enquiry via Adrian Goldberg’s label Jenny's Feather Factory (named for a great aunt who died in the Holocaust), kicking off with the abrasive chugging bass staccato but catchy False Starts, a surging Welcome To The Real World follows (Stranglers influences sparking away) with its slowed down mid-section and freak out ending.
Opening with a pulsing electronic beat, the vocals initially back in the mix, Algorithms is a slow-paced rap on similar lines to Big Special that heads to a clattering drums ending, giving way to the pop funky riffs and rhythm of Big Surprise. It ends with, first, the bass burping, drum thudding guitar stabbing Dead Horse Theory with its catchy chorus hook and then, with a spoken chatter intro, the environmental-crisis themed Fundamental with its lengthy choppy, drum drone and prog-rock guitar scraping instrumental build up to the vocals and hood refrain before it vanishes into the ether. As a bonus, there’s a live version of The Black Post with its rant against the stagnation of post-millennial culture and which surely owes a debt to Blue Oyster Cult as much as The Fall.
