.........................................................hold on......................................
what's this?................................
Revbjelde..................................
what?........................................
what kind of name is that? it doesn't promise much
.........................................................it could promise nothing.......................................or everything.........I should ask sometime, not that I know Alan Gubby, the man behind both this EP and the label, Buried Treasure.....................still.........................I'm curious............up to a point.......
the point here being that until now you'd probably never heard of Revbjelde either so I'm here in my capacity as writer about great music (have you noticed? I never post a bad review....mostly because life's too short & the list of mediocre or bad recordings I hear too long............&............I would dread meeting the creators of something I publicly dismissed at those cocaine-fuelled electronic music biz nights I'm always attending.............................................)
hold on, that doesn't happen...............
for a second I was a famous critic, like Lester Bangs & it was the 1970s & I was always attending music biz nights populated by famous musicians who would confront me angrily having read my review in Creem.........
Buccaboo starts brilliantly (bowed cello, effects, shimmering vocal) with Carry My Woes & doesn't get any worse - you can't tell what's being said but it doesn't matter because the atmosphere/mood is enough...
...then there's the title track which continues the mysterious tone with strummed guitar then slide guitar as if Elmore James was guesting & as if the player wanted, for the hell of it, to throw in a Baby Please Don't Go-type riff...........interesting.............but more interesting & what takes it up a level is the acoustic bass line, trumpet & brush work...bloody great!
Never Green is a brilliant moody interlude made all the more so by a hammered dulcimer (I think that's what it is)..................................................the blues kind of reappear on If This Is in the form of a harmonica played in a not-especially bluesy style, but then this EP is not especially any genre & several at once.....but wait, there's more.......here's Dolly Dolly! always a bonus. every album should feature David Yates & would if I were king - so here he is speaking of promises broken on stones & 'lies and untruths uttered in these walls' in his own inimitable style................................when I say things take a more Folky turn on the final track, Port Of Arundel, don't be put off; it's Folk through an echo chamber, historical Radiophonica, if you like & I don't like most of what passes for modern Folk..........but I like this EP very much.........................
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