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Review: 'GASKELL, JULIAN & RAGGED TROUSERED PHILANTHROPISTS'
'Carvery Of Blight'   

-  Label: 'Carvery Of Sound Recordings'
-  Genre: 'Folk' -  Release Date: '27th May 2016'-  Catalogue No: 'CRV001'

Our Rating:
Julian Gaskell is from Cornwall yet, while many of his songs reference the coastal setting, it's safe to say Poldark fans are not his target audience. Family entertainment be damned!

His smart PR release speaks of the raw energy of his songs in terms of specially invented genres like "agricultural-psychedelia" and "naive ditch folk; anything rather being tagged as conventional folk.

Tracks like The Extended Trilogy and Somebody On A Laptop offer wry views about our digital lifestyles while Dolomite Spirit is the kind of driving song Springsteen might have written if he were reincarnated as an impoverished British street hustler.

My main criticism of this record is that Gaskill is too ready to adopt the role of the Pogue-ish punk poet and the grating harshness of his voice undermines the cleverness of his songs.

It as if he is deliberately setting out to de-intellectualise the content but there is no cause to be bashful about inspired lines like "Lay down your weary harmonium and gaze into the cubic zirconium" on the opening track Herbs And Spices From Afar.

The puns of the title track used to describe a meal from hell further illustrate his skills as a wordsmith.

On top of this, his arrangements of three traditional folk songs show an awareness of the roots to his rebellious spirit. Cruel Coppinger is based on a legendary figure in Cornish folklore first celebrated in Song Of The Western Men, while The Dead Horse and The Murdered Brother are revamped into nihilistic studies in mortality.

Throw in a bit of lo-fi Bossa Nova (Boss Armadillo) and you have a roughly rounded portrait of an artist as a young man who is more likely to set sail in a homemade vessel or hitch a ride with a local smuggler than charter a fancy sailing ship. You travel with him at your own risk.

Julian Gaskell's website
  author: Martin Raybould

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GASKELL, JULIAN & RAGGED TROUSERED PHILANTHROPISTS - Carvery Of Blight