Joe Woodham – ‘Longshore Drift’ from ‘Worldwide Weather’

Joe Woodham’s ‘Worldwide Weather’ is bookended by two pieces with mirrored angular refrains which “introduce and close the album’s atmospheric themes [of weather and its relationship to the interconnectedness of the oceans and the moon] both musically and conceptually”. Elsewhere the album includes tracks like single ‘Spring Tide’, where an ache builds to a euphoric, soaring release and then ebbs to evaporation; ‘Walrus’, with a forlorn cry of guitar gently weeping on a bed of shefallying shingle like Kerouac serenading the heavenly bodies, or vice-versa; the night-time seclusion of ‘In Syzygy’ with its clipped guitar puncturing synth waves and subliminal ocean rumbles, notes in conjunction and opposition suggesting the pulse and pull of invisible energies. Close your eyes and it’s almost possible to hear them whispering: ‘All change is good change.’ Hymnal. Quietly, almost casually seductive.

My personal favourite though is ‘Longshore Drift’, a song that appropriately slips along languorously on a picked acoustic guitar atop which Woodham sings gently through a field of static, a folk song for the ghosts of tomorrow. It recalls Ben Watt and Robert Wyatt glimpsed through the wrong end of a telescope, a thin layer of pollen dust spread on the eyepiece. Captivating. 

My full review is published on Caught By The River: https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2023/06/joe-woodham-worldwide-weather-review/

The Declining Winter – ‘This Heart Beats Black’ from ‘Really Early, Really Late’

There was a fine article in The Manchester Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/aug/02/glacial-pleasures-of-slowcore-codeine-duster earlier this year about ‘slowcore’. Stevie Chick knows his stuff and naturally focused the piece on the American bands from that era: Codeine (the vinyl reissues of whose albums formed the impetus for the article), Rome, Low, Galaxie 500. All great groups who made breathtaking records. It was a shame, however, that word count perhaps precluded any reference to UK developments of the ‘genre’ beyond the obvious nods to Mogwai (well, a writer ought to know his target audience’s sweet spots, right?). In particular it was a shame that there was no reference to Hood, whose 1994 ‘Cabled Linear Traction’ album connected the dots between Swell Maps, Roy Montgomery and those sad slow sounds of the young Americans. In many respects too Hood started sketching out the prototype for a New English Pastoralism that has filtered through the last three decades, informing in particular the side of that which swings away from folk traditions and instead looks to the more ambient edges of Jazz and modern classical.

It is a blend of worlds that finds a perfect balance in the hour it takes for ‘Really Early, Really Late’ to unfold, this being the latest in a fifteen year (or thereabouts) string of marvellous low key releases by The Declining Winter. Led by Hood’s Richard Adams, The Declining Winter has had a shifting group of players over the years, each helping to meticulously craft Adam’s visions into reality. On ‘Really Early, Really Late’ he is joined by a team that includes former Hood member Gareth Brown and Epic45 players Ben Holton and James Yates. Alongside them sit more regular Declining Winter alumni Julie Bisset, Sarah Kemp and Peter Hollo. It’s a sizeable group of players and together they make a sound that is both expansive and intricate, complex and simple. Indeed, the record, as its title might suggest, is an enticing combination of opposites, being suffused with an introspective serenity that somehow manages to be both weighted with the darkness of loss and yet be as weightless as woodsmoke.

Chords breathe heartaches and strings pierce the air like kestrels in the summer’s heat. There are woozy Jazz interventions that recall the time when Emily sought the spirit of Alice Coltrane in a Welsh barn. Words are whispered in the shadow of pylons, suggestions of movement and torpor in the same delivery. The cadence is glacial yet somehow captured in a timelapse that confirms our impermanence. Slowness exaggerates the meaningless of human existence whilst focusing attention on the beautiful, invaluable detail of the moment. The devil is in the detail and so is God.

Jasmine Minks – ‘When They Fall’ from ‘We Make Our Own History’

If there were identifiable themes in the Unpopular listening throughout 2023 then one of them may have been that of artists roused from periods of slumber delivering gratifyingly mature works. Jasmine Minks’ hiatus in reality has never been that long, for various incarnations have performed and released a couple of excellent singles in the past four or five years. That said, it is nearly a decade since the last comprehensive compilation (‘Cut Me Deep – The Anthology 1984-2014’) and nearly two since ‘The Revenge Of…’ featured my photograph of children running on Troon Beach. It’s even longer since a full album of new material appeared (2001’s ‘Popartglory’), so ‘We Make Our Own History’ was indeed a welcome return from the hinterland. How old does THAT makes us feel?

Unlike the more experimental approach taken on ‘Popartglory’, ‘We Make Our Own History’ is more comprehensively identifiable as Classic Minks. It’s songs may be, on the whole, just a little more awkward around the edges, but its infusion of Power Pop, Punk, and Soul sources at least approaches the heady heights of their early Creation years output such as their eponymous classic from 1986 and 1988’s peerless ‘Another Age’. There may be nothing to touch the heady brilliance of, say, ‘Cut Me Deep’ or ‘Cold Heart’ here, but cuts like rousing opener ‘She Knows’ and the brittle, beautiful ‘She Broke More Than Just Your Mother’s Heart’ do much to assure us that Jasmine Minks in 2023 are as essential as they ever were.

The best is saved for last, however, and album closer ‘When They Fall’ is a psych-cloaked piece of folk reflection that comes across like ‘The Notorious Byrd Brothers’ and Pentangle slow dancing, gently mad in the mist and snow. A perfect ending to a splendid outing.

Dot Allison – ‘Weeping Roses’ from ‘Consciousology’

‘Consciousology’ continues Dot Allison’s journey into the mystical space where music meets the natural realm in a symbiotic relationship. Opening track ‘Shyness of Crowns’ has the shimmer of Cocteau Twins heard through a pebblebed heat haze; a Spring afternoon lying in the bluebells of Blackbury Camp gazing skyward and marvelling at the space given by the trees’ upper reaches to each of their partners’ (a phenomenon that gives the track it’s title). ’Unchanged’ ups the pace and in hindsight might be the odd one out on the record as it drives along with an electricity that prickles the skin. Not to say it’s upbeat exactly. Rather it throbs, pulsates with earthy magic and a peculiarly soft strength. ‘Bleached by The Sun’ and ‘Moon Flowers’ work beautifully as a pair. The songs are brittle, tender, like Bridget St John in a Francesca Woodman photograph or Anne Briggs and Vashti Bunyan clutching the midsummer moonrise under a cloak of violets. Strings throw morning mists across landscapes of gently plucked guitar. This is folk music glancing backwards over its shoulder whilst remembering tomorrow’s aches and aimless regrets that are no regrets at all.

‘220Hz’ is a bubbling punctuation mark in the record. To get back to those notions of conceptuality that thread through the album, 220Hz is apparently the frequency at which tree roots communicate through the earth. To me it sounds like Siren song echoing through the har. ‘Double Rainbow’ meanwhile is obfuscated psychedelia featuring “the electrical activity in a plant… translated into pitch variations”. It results in tremulous whispers in foreign languages heard through keyhole cracks and carried away on thermals. These are threads that weave through themselves on a loom of ancient oak, each picking up the ghosts impregnated in the grain. ‘Milk and Honey’, meanwhile sounds like Avalon glimpsed through a vaguely sceptical Scottish eye; deliciously appealing yet peculiarly alien and Other.

The album closes with the intimate ‘Weeping Roses’, a song inspired by a tape given to Allison by Andrew Weatherall in the ‘90s that included two songs by Tim Hardin. At that point Hardin was, if I recall correctly, one of the great unknowns. Certainly, someone forgotten and not yet brought back to the public’s attention. ‘Weeping Roses’ then is perhaps a hymn to the beauty of both Hardin’s songwriting and to the magical spirit of Weatherall, who inspired so many with his eternal enthusiasm both for music and art and, perhaps more critically, for sharing his passion without fear or favour. It is a song that one fears might disappear when one opens one’s eyes; that might yet dissolve into the star-speckled oblivion of the heavens.

Indeed, the whole of ‘Consciousology’ often sounds like it might barely be there; space more vital than the music that punctuates it. Space that breathes into sound, that gifts it with the opportunity to weave around us like the scents and the energies of the nature than envelops and invisibly penetrates us. It is a record that rewards multiple listenings with its delicate layers of meaning and depth of thought. Thirty years, it might suggest, is no time at all and yet all the time imaginable.

My full review is published by International Times here: https://internationaltimes.it/consciousology-by-dot-allison/

Andrew Rumsey – ‘The Old Boys’ from ‘Evensongs’

I am not certain why I did not include Andrew Rumsey’s ‘English Grounds: A Pastoral Journey’ in the 2022 Unpopular advent of books for I certainly enjoyed it a great deal. It is possible that I felt its blend of the religious and the pastoral seemed somewhat pale next to the work of Ronald Blythe, whose mighty prose it felt neighbour to. In all honesty, though, what wouldn’t?

‘English Grounds’ then is certainly a recommended read, but it is Rumsey’s musical collection ‘Evensongs’ that really hits the mark. At twenty six minutes in length it is, perhaps, the diametric opposite to yesterday’s advent entry of The Royal Ottawa’s ‘Carcosa’ and is suffused with a beautifully restrained English intimacy. Informed by the poetic mystical qualities of English folk music’s two great Nick’s (Drake and Talbot), the songs on ‘Evensong’ are beautiful vignettes that meditate on simple detail cloaking deep spiritual currents.

Recorded live in a single day at the All Saints church in the Wiltshire village of Ham, ‘Evensongs’ certainly captures “something of the magic of a country church in August – complete with bees, birdsong, and a whisper of wheezy organ” that was Rumsey’s intent, but it is also broad enough even within its small scope to avoid any of the potential pitfalls of being ‘conceptual’. Instead it comes across as entirely natural, a set of restrained, peaceful observations. The songs feel like little moments of retreat and replenishment, reverberating with the delicious energy that is to be found in exactly these kinds of small churches.

Each of the eight songs, the majority under three minutes in length, is a gem informed by folk tradition, but it is the closing track ‘The Old Boys’ to which I find myself drawn again and again. Recalling Simon and Garfunkel’s beloved ‘Old Friends’, the song ticks off the names of the church goers “leaving softly from Evensong” and in so doing is, under the inevitable recent collective memory of the pandemic, inevitably also tinged with the fragile sorrow of loss. It is an eloquent ending, but is not the end. Time slips on. The waters flow and the cycle continues. We go on.

Also, whilst I generally struggle with Podcasts (I would rather much read, but appreciate I am in an, ahem, Unpopular minority there) I very much enjoyed listening to Rumsey talk on The Church Times podcast.

Royal Ottawa – ‘Beautiful’ from ‘Carcosa’

Any long term Unpopular followers will almost certainly know the wonderful Wally Salem who runs the tremendous Beautiful Music label and who may just be the most marvellously and naturally enthusiastic fan of music one can think of (it’s a close run thing with Brogues of ‘Not unloved’ fame). Certainly I have had Wally to thank for bringing any number of records and artists to my attention over the years, and this year perhaps his biggest recommendation was for the ‘Carcosa’ set by Royal Ottawa.

Now unlike Wally I have no personal memory of or emotional attachment to the history of (members of) Royal Ottawa, tracking back to 80s act Bugs Harvey Oswald and later side-project The Lake Effect Sound. For me then, ‘Carcosa’ has to stand (or fall) on its own merits, and after what was admittedly an initial coolness, I gave the album some further listens and with each run through it thawed my heart just that little more. At an hour and twenty and on its limited vinyl edition an epic double album, ‘Carcosa’ is for me, in truth, just a little overlong and could certainly be trimmed. I still remain unconvinced when the band up the tempo, for example, and the vocal treatment can be unnecessarily electronic at times. But I am being picky, and in truth I suspect that these are distinctly personal objections, borne of my innate mistrust for All Things Prog. True, those barriers have been broken down in recent years, not least through the likes of Nick Halliwell’s The Granite Shore, with whom I think Royal Ottawa certainly share reference points, but ingrained habits are hard to break.

When I do manage to reframe my reference points, however, ‘Carcosa’ puts me in mind of the mighty Swell, another act whose sound managed to tread the line between Progressive and Alternative with remarkable poise and aplomb. At times too they recall Dire Straits’ epic manifestations of the surreal splendour in the grubby everyday. Once upon a time I would have balked at suggesting such a thing, but this was before the likes of War On Drugs or Strand Of Oaks made such a reference cool (again) for terminally insecure souls such as mine, and after I had spent hours in a teenage bedroom immersed in the first three albums.

‘Carcosa’ at its best then recalls something of that pleasure of being unaware of the expectations of Hipness that comes in our early years and that (with luck) dissolves in later ones. It combines reflections on the past with mature rumination on the present to produce a whole that is awkward enough to reward repeated listenings and to stand proud as something resolutely outside of fashion or expectation. That’s a pretty fine achievement.

Special Friend – ‘Inertie’ from ‘Wait Until The Flames Come Rushing In’

In the past couple of years the Skep Wax label has quickly developed into the epitome of the artisanal independent foray into the decayed heart of the music industry. With a heart and soul soundly rooted in the, ah, DIY IndiePunk spirit of the 80s/90s boygirlrevolution, the label might sometimes feel like a piece of provocatively middle-class performative theatre, but is none the worse for that. The reissue of 1992 album ‘Le Jardin De Heavenly’ spotlighted those IndiePunk spirits and delighted old codgers and youthful, erm, ‘Cutie Punkers’ alike but it was the label’s releases by new artists that really caught the attention. Panic Pocket’s ‘Mad Half Hour’ album might have crept into this advent series if the field had been less marvellously congested, but the ‘Wait Until The Flames Come Rushing In’ set by label mates Special Friend just trumps it. At times it felt like there was a new ‘single’ coming out from Special Friend every other week, and with cuts like the tremendous ‘Bête’, ‘Selkie’ and ‘Fault Lines’ the French duo of Erica Ashleson and Guillame Siracusa were welcome regulars on the Unpopular mixes during much of 2023. Each of those tracks in their own way encapsulates the way that Special Friend blend influences from the likes of Broadcast, Pavement, Galaxie 500 and Mazzy Star into something that, whilst being audibly referential is nonetheless impressively individual. Perhaps best of all is the mesmerising mild motorik folk shimmy of ‘Inertie’. With the lustre of Mahogany and a Stereolab sheen, it is a delicate three and a half minute cycle of off-centre dreaming, a perfect punctuation pause for reflection in an album filled with treats. I’m excited to hear what Special Friend make next.

Emma Tricca – ‘Autumn’s Fiery Tongue’ from ‘Aspirin Sun’

I am perpetually surprised by the number of things that pass one by when one’s eye wanders away to Something Different. As example, I surely ought to have known about Emma Tricca before stumbling across her ‘Aspirin Sun’ set earlier this year. Had my eye (or ear, or whatever) been more securely focused on the realms of, ah, The Fringes Of Folk Music back in 2009 I would surely have dug her ‘Minor White’ set, whilst 2018’s ‘St Peter’ would certainly have thrilled me with its chilled take on journeys taken through the landscape of fragile folk tales. A duet with Bridget St John this year (the gorgeous ‘Rubies’) shines a light on where Tricca has come from, but’ Aspirin Sun’ itself seems to track another trajectory that explores inner and outer spaces through longer songs hovering somewhere in a netherworld part way between Folk and Prog. Songs balance a brittle spaciousness with a brooding sense of the unknown. Electricity crackles through the dawn and poetry creaks in the darkness. There is a beguiling eeriness here, like stumbling on Francesca Woodman photographs discarded in the forest. An ache of vulnerability slow-dances cheek-to-cheek with a mature confidence throughout the whole and proves to be mesmerisingly rewarding. Eight songs of peculiarly warm bleakness; something to cherish as the world dissolves.

Iraina Mancini – ‘Sugar High’ from ‘Undo The Blue’

The sound of what I might still glancingly refer to as Pop Music largely passed me by in 2023. In truth there has been an ever diminishing interest/awareness over the past few years and I admit that I am completely at ease with this. Occasionally I think I might write some extended piece about the reasons (something that hovers around the issues of Not Having Children and of reaching the point in life of being bewildered by/detached from What Young People Care About) but realise that the very fact my interest has dwindled means I am unlikely ever to find the motivation to do so. Besides, I am certain that there will be Opinion Pieces Aplenty that scour similar tracts of thought and since I am loathe to actually read any, why would I want to add to the dismal cacophony of elderly men confused by The Modern World?

All of which is by tortuous introduction to the Best Pop Record of 2023 (well, the best that I heard), a record that, for a few weeks at the end of summer found itself on repeat play. This in itself is a test of Great Pop. Does it make you obsessed for five minutes? Does it mean the world for the time it takes the sun to pass through the sky and then fade deliciously from view, leaving a memory burn that is peculiarly fiercer than reality? Does your heart break then mend then break again, ad infinitum? Or at least for the three minutes it takes for the song to play out. Does it simultaneously mean Everything and Nothing?

Iraina Mancini’s ‘Undo The Blue’ ticks all of these boxes and more. It is a record that effortlessly seems to both reference The Past whilst being resolutely Of The Moment (although, as perviously mentioned, I am hardly one to comment accurately on the ’Nowness’ of any bloody thing). I understand that listeners to The Radio 6 will likely have already been familiar with some of the singles from the album (‘Shotgun’, ‘Do It (You Stole The Rhythm’)’, Undo The Blue’) but for me it was like discovering an enchanting grotto filled with shiny new treats, and the delight at doing so was palpable. In the depths of December gloom it still sounds sensational: a glitter ball of tinsel and lights; a dusting of icing sugar on stollen bites. And from a top class selection box of sensational treats my favourite by the slimmest of margins is the appropriately titled ‘Sugar High’. Appropriately too there is a Saint Etienne remix of the song, which makes perfect sense because Mancini seems to share a similar infatuation with making something New from the same box of old reference points (60’s/70’s, French Pop, Psychedelia , Soul, Garage, Ye-Ye Girls). When I first heard it though I was immediately put in mind of when The Pipettes were sensationally seducing my world, which also says as much about my age as anything, I am sure. Younger readers (though I doubt that such a thing exists) will be able to drop more contemporary reference points. I, however, am too ignorant and lazy to even bother trying. Instead I shall just hit ‘repeat’ and let the sounds of someone else’s joyous release envelop me for a moment. Euphoria multiplied by weightlessness. Magic.

A Man Called Adam – ‘Fight or Flight’ from ‘The Girl With A Hole In Her Heart’

Somehow I completely missed the fact that A Man Called Adam had made an album in 2019 (the fabulous ‘Farmarama’) so for me at least it felt like this year’s ‘The Girl With A Hole In Her Heart’ set was some kind of magical return from the void. Now one hates to use the despicable genre-term Intelligent Dance Music, but 1991’s ‘The Apple’ and 1998’s ‘Duende’ were certainly records that appealed as much to the intellect as to the feet. In the days when I was doing the Tangents website, the incomparable Kevin Pearce kept the flame burning and we warmed ourselves as much on his texts as on the sounds conjured by Sally Rogers and Steve Jones. He used to insist that ‘The Apple’ was the best album of the ‘90s and from this distance he was surely on the money. In hindsight he might have been a little cooler on ‘Duende’ than I remember, but context of time and space are everything.

In the context of 2023 ‘The Girl With A Hole In Her Heart’ sounds reassuringly like A Man Called Adam. It’s in Sally Rogers’ voice of course, but it is also in the, ahem, vibe of the whole sound. House meets Jazz meets ambient techno experimentalism on the library steps (if you can find one that the Tories have not managed to close down). It is a sound that is esoteric without flying over one’s head, that is often rooted in rhythm whilst acknowledging that, for some of us, some of the time, the beat is not enough. That’s said not as a pejorative, performative dance stance you understand, but more of a gentle observation. Shrug the shoulders and walk into the sunrise. If you know, you know.

‘The Girl With A Hole In Her Heart’ then resonates both with the magnificent treasures of their past and with what feels like natural preoccupations of the present. In other words it is a record of Balearic spirit that conjures memories of Rogers’ Teeside youth as ghosts which filter through contemporary landscapes. Time slips and pauses, passes and rewinds. Magical mesmerism.



I am glad that A Man Called Adam are back in my life.