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Review: 'LANDRY, GILL'
'Gill Landry'   

-  Label: 'ATO Records'
-  Genre: 'Folk' -  Release Date: '22nd June 2015'

Our Rating:
The first thing to make clear is that Gill Landy is a man. He sometimes goes by the less genderly ambiguous stage name of Frank Lemon and, when not flying solo, he is also a multi-instrumentalist and songwriting member of Nashville folkies Old Crow Medicine Show.

Aside from his musical activities, the Louisiana native is described as "an adventuresome photographer, hitchhiking gentleman, self taught painter, shade tree mechanic, and then some". A jack of all trades travelling man, in other words, and one whose songs have also shown that he is no stranger to heartache.

On his third album he is still much inclined to brood about love going sour or turning to "debris" (Bad Love) but the ten songs also find him "moving forward with compassion and kindness". It's not that he has no regrets, it's just that he's in the mood to put things into some kind of perspective.

This doesn't mean that he is overflowing with joy and contentment. On the contrary, the black humour of the brief, 2-minute opener, Funeral In My Heart gives a flavour of his temperament : "the lonesome hearse rolls slowly to the graveyard of my mind , other than that I'm feeling fine".

His lyrics are full of such vivid imagery and there are many similarly memorable lines. On Just Like You he is sustained by fond memories of a woman and recalls a dream in which "you were there sitting in the kitchen chair, reading Bukowski in your underwear, looking fine"

All this reveals more than a little world-weariness within these tunes but there's never any hint of wallowing in self-pity.

"Give me more than flesh and bone" he demands on Take This Body, the album's standout track featuring a marvellous duet with Laura Marling.

Other guests include violinist Odessa Jorgensen and Mumford & Sons' trumpeter Nick Etwell whose playing adds to the Tex-Mex flavour of Fennario and Lost Love.

As we well know. love hurts and wounds, and while Gill Landry isn't telling us anything new, he articulates his own emotional scars with genuine dignity and poetry.   



Gill Landry's website
  author: Martin Raybould

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LANDRY, GILL - Gill Landry