Robin Williamson
Album: Love Will Remain
Label: Quadrant Corner
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.pigswhiskermusic.co.uk

The latest release from Robin (followup to Just Like The River) is an admirably coherent collection of new songs and well-chosen covers that, while not scaling the heights of intensity reached with the ECM albums Seed-at-Zero and The Iron Stone, still more than satisfies and will I'm sure rank with the best albums of his recent years. It's a sanguine album, and quite relaxed in character (at least compared to Just Like The River), its aura of intimacy really hard to resist - this being only second best to the experience of seeing Robin perform live.

Love Will Remain seems on initial acquaintance to be another quite stripped-down affair, certainly in terms of instrumentation (the majority of the tracks subsisting on a palette of just voice and guitar), but somehow it lacks nothing in textural richness. Robin's characteristic flatpicked guitar technique invariably embodies a compellingly melodic variety of strum that weaves its magic in surprising ways and delightfully, inventively, eschews the inevitable; it's an ideal, and ideally integrated companion to his unique, distinctive voice - which I'm thoroughly convinced has never sounded better of late. That voice is an extraordinary instrument in its own right, its multiple decorations and other ornamental and tonal idiosyncrasies transcending any charge of contrivance in their unerring service of the song texts; check out the delicate incantations of Laying On The Colours especially, and The Signs For Which Our Fathers Died - and marvel anew at Robin's perennially impressive vocal range.

Vocal dexterity is also a key feature of Robin's triumphant creative medley-cum-amalgamation of the pithy, cryptic Pink Floyd (Syd Barrett) mini-epic Chapter 24 and George Harrison's I-Ching derivation The Inner Light (yes, that obscure Beatles B-side!) - sheer genius! That track is one of a handful which employ a modicum of multitracking - here a weird, gloomily atmospheric pulsating drone (Ebow or electric guitar?), elsewhere a mandolin or two (recalling the rippling arabesques of Myrrh), harmonica and/or or tambourine, some songs also resonating to a homely kick-drum beat.

What of the rest of the material? Another of the album's covers, the nicely Carter-esque Stoned On Your Love All The Time, turns out to be a woozily affectionate treatment of David Alan Coe's Tennessee Whiskey, kept in perfect focus by its stylish, delectably busy guitar accompaniment. Robin's own latest compositions are a strong bunch, incorporating, with gorgeously uncluttered expressiveness, his trademark philosophical percipience, almost incidentally embodying some brilliantly memorable, airpunch-worthy instances of acute sensory perception (as, on I Always Followed Music: "I seem to taste a word unsaid just beyond my tongue" and "my heart yearns for the distances my eyes cannot perceive").

While recognising that Robin tends to take the "that was then" view as regards his earlier music, preferring always to look forward, at the same time there's often more than a touch of retrospection and nostalgia in this current batch of songs - on Love Will Remain, it's a combination of regretful hindsight and insight that's refracted through 40-odd years' life-experience; for instance, I guess one might compare Since Words Can Fly Invisible with the simple but hugely poignant personal odysseys of the 5000 Spirits period like First Girl I Loved. Similarly with the slightly Dylanesque Fair Miles Never Wasted (seemingly a kind of response to Robin's decision to cover The Band's Whispering Pines earlier on the disc), the musical compensation for whose altogether plainer lyric comes in the form of its refreshingly twisted guitar solos. There are hints of Dream Journals in the autobiographically slanted I Always Followed Music and the "life-travelogue" A Road Wound Winding, the latter arguably the most exotic-sounding track with its eerie echosome mandolin and huskily declaimed poetic reminiscences, these feet being kept firmly on terra firma by virtue of a chunky speaker-shifting bass line that underpins the structure on a rather PIL-like counterpoint, embellished by a bluesy harmonica and tambourine beat: by which method, of course, "the music gets through…".

Finally, a note as regards availability: Love Will Remain comes as a limited-edition release, in one rather unusual format only; it takes the form of a 12-inch vinyl LP with a free CD (containing entirely identical musical content) and a full-size booklet of "paintings, notes, thoughts and lyrics". The latter's artwork is beautifully reproduced, and it and its accompanying notes form an integral part of the album's artistic statement, but there are several unfortunate typos within the lyrics which slightly compromise the desirability of the whole package, and especially perhaps when one also needs to consider the awkward storage needs for vinyl nowadays.

David Kidman