Ba Da Ding Rec./Red Deer Club
Benjamin Wetherill : Laura (UK,2008)****'
This is a remarkable official debut from Benjamin Wetherill which makes you go listen again and again. Jeremy Barnes (from A Hawk and a Hacksaw, but also from Neutral Milk Hotel) decided to help and produce/arrange this recording last year with his band A Hawk and a Hacksaw, recorded mostly at a deserted castle (Schossberger) near Budapest. It remains somehow a singer-songwriter album, but the arrangements have an equal importance : subtle contemporary chamber-folk music with improvised and arranged ideas, with occasional reed brass arrangements (with Eastern European and gypsy trail hints but also with some classical hints), and some Hungarian hammered zither combined with a wonderful fundament of fingerpicking guitar (by Benjamin, besides some electric organ, piano, an acid folkish tin whistle and percussion) and some cello-like viola/violin arrangements (Heather Trost?), and some sparse trumpet solos. Also remarkable are the few subtle environmental sounds (of day and night sounds). There is some Romantism involved in the songs (1 is a traditional, “shallow brown”, fitting perfectly with the other songs, another one, “oh sorrow” has some traditional excerpts). The singing at its most attractive has something of a troubadour on his knees expressing his song (“kissing under poplars”), an atmosphere which combines older, 19th century aristocracy and subtlety, into a contemporary vision, even when sung from a relative youngster, from our times, it is able to range far beyond this horizon of existence. The improvised strings then are like the coming and passing of times and occasions.
The band contains of Jeremy Barnes (Production, accordion, percussion), Heather Trost (Viola, viloin), Gabor Farkas (Clarinet), Zsolt Kurtosi (Double Bass), Ferencs Kovacs (Trumpet), Sari Kovacs (Flute) and Balasz Unger (Cimbalom & bratch).
