WOOD & WASTE

Writerly Taste & Crossover Vision Forms Decadent LP by Spirituals/Blues Guitarist Novelists famously use their day jobs for material-guitarist Tom Rodwell mines his crossover blues career with a writerly taste for the surreal on Wood & Waste a decadent and charmingly outré collection. Wood & Waste is what used to be called a cult record a set of warmly anarchic influences and timeworn qualities that is Tom Rodwell s trademark. His songs resemble ragged short stories cobbled-together genres from an alternate history. The aim is to locate each song in a very specific room of it s own with contrasting feels like layers of paint or old wallpaper. The album s centrepiece is She Got Me Boiling a juggernaut of psychedelic calypso welded to mindless riffs on cannibalism that would make the Mighty Sparrow blush. Driven by a bass-heavy guitar pulse and animated carnival drums it s a fiendishly irresistible piece of music as is the absurdist one-chord freak-out Touch Me Like a Teddybear featuring NZ free improv notorieties Jeff Henderson and Chris O Connor on drums. Improvisation is a key theme of Wood & Waste where frequently a skeletal idea transforms into a fleshy dance rhythm. Keep on Knockin subverts a determined Bo Diddley beat with dissonant Mellotron in praise of Edward Hopper and William Morris. Plenty Time is a species of prog rhumba set in Roman Britain indebted to Nigerian giant King Sunny Ade. An English artist moored in New Zealand Rodwell s revival of blues music as a vehicle for dance has been supple enough to embrace rhythms from spirituals and calypso and seen him support acts like Otis Taylor C.W. Stoneking and Leon Russell. ( Beautiful tunes beautiful groove-you don t hear that anymore said Derek Trucks). A parallel career as a session player has seen him moonlight live and on record for artists as diverse as Lonnie Holley Robert Lamm and Don McGlashan as well as various avant-jazz projects. LP features download card.