KEITH JAMES – Word Paintings (Hurdy Gurdy HGA2930)
It’s been a while since I heard and reviewed a Keith James album, so I was intrigued to find out what he’d been during the (very stressful, for all of us) interim. His album Word Paintings (due for release early in 2024) builds on his songwriting partnership with artist, ceramicist and writer Jenny Finch, previously heard on the 2021 album Can You Imagine? And what a very rewarding collaboration it is too. I understand from the review by Dai Jeffries for Folking.com that the final release may be different to the collection Keith sent to me last year as regards choice and order of tracks. I don’t have an up-to-date release date, but when I have a date and link I’ll post the information on this site.
The version of the album that I received featured 11 songs by Keith and Jenny as well as a song each from John Martyn and Nick Drake.
- Given Keith’s mastery of the nylon-strung guitar, it’s no surprise that ‘Postcard From Havana’ tells its absorbing story against a a musical background strongly suggestive of both Spanish and Afro-Cuban music.
- ‘Solid Air’ is the John Martyn jazz-flavoured classic first recorded in 1973: it’s remarkable how Keith gets under Martyn’s skin here, vocally and instrumentally, yet somehow makes the song his own, fitting entirely appropriately with the rest of the material here.
- ‘Nocturne’ is a dramatic, piano-driven song, with a suggestion of atonality here and there that adds to the overtones of desperation in the lyric.
- ‘Winter In Poitiers’ is more conventional in form and production: if the lyric wasn’t so very Keith James, you could almost imagine it sung by a Cliff Richard or Paul Young (and it might well have been a hit).
- ‘Currency Of Nations’ is a series of oblique, downbeat observations of ‘digital humanity’. Very effective.
- ‘The Lizard And The Butterfly’, with its electric guitar and solid percussion, is closer to rock than most of the tracks here, in a 60s sort of way. In fact it reminded me a little of Richard Fariña’s ‘Reno Nevada’, but in a good way.
- ‘Northern Sky’ is the other cover on this record, being one of Nick Drake’s songs. It’s a particularly fitting choice for the other cover on this album, in that ‘Solid Air’ was written for Nick. In fact, ‘Northern Sky’ seems to have been written while Nick was (briefly) living with John and Beverley Martin. Keith’s delivery here isn’t really that much like Nick’s, but has a fragility that seems fitting, given what we know now of that tragic talent.
- The enigmatic lyric to ‘The Photograph’ supplies its own series of snapshots, like a slide show or a video using stills “frozen in time”to support music. Fine music it is, too.
- The title of ‘Pram Wheels And Broken Lampshades’ sounds like something Tom Waits might have written, but the lyric subverts the premise of ‘Broken Bicycles’ and sets it into a livelier arrangement that is yet somehow more dangerous.
- Slide guitar and harmonica overlays give ‘Smoking Dog Café’ a blues-y vibe set against a lyric that somehow recalls the Beat Generation, or perhaps the generation of songsmiths (the Doors, the Grateful Dead et al) that absorbed those influences. I wouldn’t hate hearing some more like this.
- ‘Moment To Shine’ – the lyric echoes Keith’s stance as a climate change activist (as demonstrated in his Paradise Lost album), in a fittingly synth-heavy setting.
- ‘Sideways Smile’ is a bit of a surprise, given the seriousness and sophistication of so much of Keith’s output: a positive, poppy earworm. I love it!
- ‘She Bathes In Light’ reminded me a little, thematically of ‘She’s A Rainbow’, but has an richness of colour, imagery and humanity that evaded the Jagger-Richard song.
I already knew Keith as a fine poet and lyricist as well as a super-competent musician, but this collaboration is clearly working beautifully: while the arrangements and production (jointly executed by Branwen Munn and Keith himself) are as accomplished as ever. Some of the tracks here seem a little more accessible than some of his work, while retaining a poetic sensibility and musical scope that puts him closer to the Nouvelle Chanson heirs of Brel and Brassens than to mainstream rock.
If you know and love Keith’s work, you’ll certainly want to add this to your collection. If you’re not sure, I recommend that you give it a try!
David Harley
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