The month’s best guitar music – a hand-picked selection of the finest fretwork on wax
Richard Hawley
Sublime songcraft from Sheffield’s laureate of the lonesome Inspired by a random remark he heard a visitor to his home city of Sheffield make, InThisCityTheyCallYouLoveis one of Richard Hawley’s finest albums to date –and that’s saying something. The quality of his songcraft has been both remarkable and remarkably constant across the past 23 years of his postLongpigs solo career. If you imagine a jukebox in a 60s cafe with a row of Norton motorcycles parked outside, you’ll have an idea of Hawley’s musical touchstones –everything from Johnny Kidd &The Pirates to The Everly Brothers. Yet for all that, Hawley does not seem aman imprisoned by his influences; he is simply comfortably at home among them.
The ballad HearThatLonesomeWhistleBlowis the kind of song Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson might have written –simple and shot straight at the heart, Hawley’s 1950 J-200 playing soft and low. Rocker DeepSpace sees him let fly with cranked amps and junk-store fuzz as he sings,‘Oh my God, what have we done / turned our backs upon the sun’ – a line both apocalyptic and grittily real, the song detonating from the speakers. The next track, DeepWaters, goes the opposite way –Hawley seems almost to be strumming alone in an empty bar as he sings, ‘It’s time that I should find where I’m forgiven / it’s time that I be all that I can be.’ However, on the evidence of this wonderfully honest, intimate album, he’s already there.
Standout track: DeepWaters
For fans of: The Everly Brothers, Scott Walker, Elvis
Kavus Torabi
Gong frontman finds solace in emotional exile During the pandemic, a lot of people found lockdown very difficult. For Gong frontman Kavus Torabi it led to a period of traumatic upheaval in his personal life. With The
Banishing, Kavus has turned the psychological fallout from that crisis into a rather beautiful album whose dark corners are illuminated by a kind of esoteric optimism. Opener, The Horizontal Man, places bleak colours on the canvas, its sparse dulcimer-like melody like drips of frigid water from an icicle. If that song represents the fall, the rest of the album follows Kavus on a long climb towards daylight again. Snake Humanis is a lovely track, reminiscent of Robyn Hitchcock in its artless, lysergic wit and Kavus plays a gem of a solo in it, too. Meanwhile, poignant PushTheFaders invites us to stand beside him on the front lawn of his heart, watching the house burn down. Psychedelic albums often engage the imagination of the listener – less often the emotions. With The Banishing, Torabi has made a more complete, unflinching piece of art than most psychonauts ever attempt.
Standout tra
