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Review: 'EDWARDS, MATTHEW & THE UNFORTUNATES'
'Folklore'   

-  Label: 'Gare Du Nord Records'
-  Genre: 'Indie' -  Release Date: '14th May 2017'-  Catalogue No: 'GDNCD014'

Our Rating:
This is Matthew Edwards & THE Unfortunates' second album and is themed around Matthew's return from California to live back in Birmingham after a 20 year sabbatical in the sun. To tempt some of you there are guest appearances by Dagmar Krause, Fred Frith and ex-Pere Ubu/Captain Beefheart alumnus Eric Drew Feldman.

The Album opens with Birmingham, a tale of a prodigal son's return to the concrete miasma of the Midlands. It sounds like he is trying to do for Birmingham what Marc Almond did for Soho on his Piccadilly Bongo collaboration with Jeremy Reed.

Lazy is a break up song with some great guitar playing, which sounds anything but lazy like his baby was. It just draws me in and makes me want to hear that guitar again and again. Folklore is more laid back with a keyboard drone that everything else is built around. It's gentle and also tells a story within the lyrics and the overall effect is quite bucolic.

When We Arrived At The Mountain opens with guitar effects that wouldn't be out of place in a Sergio Leone film. As it builds, Dagmar adds some background aural texture before the vocals come in and sound quite a bit like late period Jeremy Gluck as he lists the things he is grateful for and the shock that he's still with us. Again, the way the song swirls and builds really draws me in.

Ungainly is a love song of sorts for a woman who saved him both from himself and others - no doubt all while sounding like Robert Coyne. I love the way the piano part comes in with the whispered backing vocals. It feels like they are anything but ungainly.

I Can Move The Moon has a gently psychedelic opening as he's lost his spiritual side. The music sounds almost like it wants to be a little bit Prefab Sprout goes psychedelic and that is not meant as an insult. I wish, however, that I could remember where I know the repeating guitar figure in the instrumental at the end of the song from.

The Willow Girl strips things back to a very gentle folk song with strings (and is it a clavinet?) as Matthew sings about the life of The Willow Girl. It feels like it should be on a soundtrack to some impossibly unhappy scene that manages to retain a restrained beauty as everything goes wrong.

Home is not a cover of the Iggy Pop song but a seemingly soft song of despair at what went wrong and made him run for home with some cool chiming keyboards and guitar. It's all full of regret and considers the possibility of a way forwards towards redemption.

Song Of Songs is a chamber folk, almost neoclassical, reflection of things that have happened and the need to tether your life to the comfort of singing. Somehow the chamber folk gives way to a blistering guitar solo that seems to have an Indian almost raga-like influence which makes for quite a spectacular listen.

The album closes with A Young Man. This takes the same theme as Steve Wynn's Younger and runs with it, or does he just re-work and flesh out the Velvet Underground outtake I'm Not A Young Man Anymore? It's about that impermeable barrier of finding out you are now too old to be considered suitable for certain things and that you really want to just do what you want to do and not care what anyone thinks. The music is jauntier than the rest of the album and again the weave between the keyboards and guitars cooks and really makes me glad to also not be a young man anymore.

This album is well worth finding and will repay repeated listening as it grows on you.

Find out more at Gare Du Nord Records online

Matthew Edwards & The Unofrtunates online
  author: simonovitch

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EDWARDS, MATTHEW & THE UNFORTUNATES - Folklore