Nick Dellar
Album: The Alder Tree's Year
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 13
Website: http://nickdellar.bandcamp.com

Whilst I'm a fan of instrumental albums, I tend to steer clear of single instrument albums. Where I have got single instrument albums, by far the majority of these are dedicated to guitar. These tend to fall into three categories, blues riffs and shredding, Spanish and classical and those centred around the tunings and techniques with "The Alder Tree's Year" falling into the latter category.

The album is split into two distinct parts an initial section of eight songs, seven penned by Dellar and the other, "Modestly Kissed The Quaker" his interpretation of a traditional song. That's followed by "Ballinskelligs" a set of five tunes entirely penned by Dellar and like most of the album loosely inspired by Ireland, where Nick relocated to from his native Essex.

Up front, as a non-guitar player, I have to say that I find the album in its entirety, 40 minutes, a little too much, though to Dellar's credit there isn't actually a bad track on the album, it's very much a threshold piece and I found that in those smaller slicesthe album was both enlightening and mood altering. The music definitely lures you in and carries you down a path with very few points where you feel the album had drifted into noodling.

Conveniently the album has the tunings listed and the circumstances of how the tunes came to be written, which gives an idea of the reflective contemplation that brought the album into life and a life it definitely has. That said I'm sure those with a more intimate knowledge of the instrument than I will get so much more from it. I've enjoyed "The Alder Tree's Year" as an album to dip into and sort of feel it would be wrong to go beyond that.

Neil King