neil mcsweeney plies his trade in territory that’s been radio blighted by every guitar wielding blubbering hormonal sac with a plastic soul to bare, with blanditudes proffered to soft-faced men in shiny cars and bleary-eyed women drinking wine alone in over-decorated apartments. territory that once encompassed a buncha folks from sam cooke to hank williams to bob dylan to tom waits – fella’s (and fellettes) that strap on a six string or piano and bash out an honest to god song – now reduced to the sad bit in hollyoaks or the credits montage at the end of some sporting failure.

poor bugger you’d imagine, having that history behind him yet being unnecessarily lumped in with every ignorant (james and rhyming) blunt that passes off mawkish sentimentality and poor mans neil diamondisms as fingerpicked poetry, resulting in some bastard chimera of modern elton john sickly with saccharine pop bloat and a shaky synthetic woodie guthrie palsied on powerchord strum.

yes indeedy. singer songwriterry stuff. a genre that’s been spat on and shat on and raped and abused (to quote macgowan) in recent years.

now i’m no fool (and neither’s mcsweeney i’d imagine) so i’m not for a second comparing him to cooke, dylan or waits. no, what i am intimating in my usual haphazard way is how, in this oversaturated world we live in, a once mighty tradition has been reduced to tear-fests and creepy songs obsessing about girls you meet once on trains.

anyway mcsweeney’s new album’s out and succesfully does it’s bit to right this terrible terrible wrong while sounding pretty damn pleasing to the ears. there’s been a slight swing from the leonard cohen meets lou barlow hi-lo-fidelity on remember to smile to a more expansive band sound. in the same vein as (but with a much more d.i.y. aesthetic than) the elvis perkins record which was the last of this kindof thing i really liked.

so for yr pocketful of coinage what do you get? essentially another half hour of melody, guitar twang, roughed up folkness and occasional fuzzed galumphing rock. it’s about as americana as you get in sheffield(ana).

kicks off with the plain and pretty fucking-off-away-from-it-all of glencoe – ‘to live in the mountain tops, piss my name in the snow’ – sidles into one of the elliott smith style melancholic dying relationships numbers (see the ever so grim rope to hang) and from there on in staggers wonderfully between the lonely strum and plugged in stomp.

i’ll highlight a few (well three) tracks for yr aural fellating:

firstly the tiny widescreen layering of side to the sun which rather deftly (and delightfully one might add) opens up some windswept bedroom morricone / badalamenti whilst smooching nina nastasia with it’s weirdy background curtain of ghostly creak and klang.

secondly the crazy horse does deus chug and bluster of time, which frankly i’d love to hear a full record of. make up a suitable pseudonym fella and crank more of this out. yup. it’s all amplified and fuzzed and turned way the fuck up. more of the spectral western twang haunting this one too. and manages to work delirium tremens into one of the lines. maybe the screaming abdabs wouldn’t have flowed so well….

and finally, thirdly, in conclusion more neil young guitarorama (but less volumed this time) on the break. which cheekily sounds like a mash-up of young’s cinnamon girl and lou reed’s sweet jane (see magic video box below).

it’s a grand effort from one tall gentleman. does much the same as his first record, just steroids it up and strips it down on occasion. and if bon iver can sell a buncha records and get a buncha press why can’t mcsweeney?  i’m rather smitten by this…

neil mcsweeney / myspace