Jonathan Byrd & The Sentimentals
Album: Mother Tongue
Label: Sentimental Music
Tracks: 13
Website: http://www.mothertongueproject.com

Led by M.C. Hansen, a feted singer-songwriter in his own right, the Sentimentals are a Danish folkrock trio conceived as a sort of latter day answer to The Band in terms of the artists they back. Once described as sounding like a young Doc Watson, Byrd is a North Carolina songwriter with seven albums to his name. And this is their first album together, something they describe as drawing on both Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and Bob Dylan in a search to find a lyrical language that would pin the songs together. It is, they say "a sort of audio handshake and international conversation between philosophy and rock 'n'roll."

If all that sounds a bit pretentious, rest assured that, while the lyrics do touch on existentialism here and there (most notably on the yeehaw hillbilly shuffle and stomp on Natural Supernatural, which balances lines like 'the life I live forbears forever' with 'there's a hole in your hosiery'), the album is anything but, sounding a grounded and organic listening experience. A disciple of Townes Van Zandt, the influence can be heard in the Byrd-penned opener, the spare, moody Love Is The Law while his vulnerable, open-hearted love song I Don't Understand Myself ,which features just Byrd and acoustic guitar, has an air of John Prine about it.

Equally delicate, the title track is one of several joint compositions between Byrd and Hansen, the latter taking lead vocals on a song that, peppered with religious imagery, celebrates a universal spirit, "the preacher's final prayer, the last breath of air in the miner's iron lung." Hansen also takes lead on their other writing collaborations: the Dylanish I Thought I'd Seen It All, a song celebrating his infant child and drawing on both Biblical and natural world imagery; Working Man Blues #3, another simple acoustic based song with religious overtones, complete with hallelujah chorus, that draws on the Guthrie tradition celebrating the dignity and trials of the blue collar life; the gutsier Creedence-feel rock of the steady rolling There's A Storm Coming (the storm being rather more end of days than any weather phenomenon); and Harvest Time, two acoustic guitars, drums and upright bass that sketches a rustic picture of the cycle of life.

There is one other co-write, this time between Byrd and Amy Speace, the gentle acoustic blues Malchick, which, featuring just Byrd on guitar and vocal and Nikolaj Wolf on upright bass, recalls the true story of the black mongrel stray dog that, living at the Mendeleyevskaya station on the Moscow Metro, became popular with the locals only to be stabbed to death by a mentally disturbed woman in 2001, though, of course, it can also be seen as an allegory of the homeless.

Hansen contributes one wholly self-penned number , the gospel infused Sins Of Your Father with its close harmony intro and a melody that hints at Dylan's Forever Young, which leaves Byrd taking sole credit for and featuring on the remaining cuts. There's the chugging rhythm of the gradually building On The Edge, an album highpoint that, referencing Eve and Lot's wife, contains the terrific line 'God's harder on girls"; the slow blues ballad Sun On The Water with its suggestion of mental unease (and another end of the world reference); and, again conjuring the sound and spirit of Guthrie, the mix of the political and personal in the jubilee shuffling, rockabilly and swing tinted I'm Going To Change The World. Kierkagaard said "Many of us pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that we hurry past it." Slow down and take time to give this a listen.

Mike Davies