Richard Hawley... parlour blues for a more gentle world

A glance at the liner notes for new album Truelove's Gutter reveals a menagerie of antiquated and long forgotten instruments were employed in the forging of this album - lyres and lutes, a dulcimer, a harpsichord and more. Anyone know what an 'Atkin Accoustic parlour guitar' would look like? But; you can hear it. The album's sound is barrel-aged, time-worn, calloused - as if unearthered from pre-electric times. It sounds as if he wrote it while lounging in a hammock. It's fragile in a handmade kind of a way, but no less capable of sweeping emotional transcendancy.

This album took my breath away and made me cry. At the first listen, by the second song I was already transfixed and incapable of speaking, holding my breath so as not to break the spell. Taking the Great American Songbook (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Songbook) as a kind of manifesto, in some parallel universe these songs are being performed by Andy Williams, Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Frank...

While the whole album moves me deeply there are two outstanding highlights, first - "Soldier On" - which I believe you could actually drown in if you weren't careful. But it's "For Your Lover Give Some Time" that I can't get past, it is just the most gorgeous song I've heard in years. It's the sound of most of a lifetime spent with the person you love. It sounds two hundred years old, like a folk love song handed down by generations, like something your grandfather courted your grandmother with, then later would sing your baby mother to sleep with just because he liked to sing it. It's so good, it's a wrench that there's another song to follow... when all you want is to sit quietly in a chair and let the last one wash gently around your soul. I hestitate to play it, just in case I wreck it for myself forever by accident somehow.

Truelove's.. is just eight songs long, filled out by many of them stretching well past 5minutes and the closer "Don't You Cry" strolling along comfortably for 10 full minutes. It gives everything the space and time it deserves. I've no idea whether this is typical of the genre which Hawley has adopted, but in every respect - the production, the writing, the choice of instruments... - he demonstrates a fiercely independent, bold artistic vision, totally at a tangent to seemingly everything around him. Put it on and you're immediately given a breather from the hectic, the digital, the modern. Immense. Dreamy.