Tim Eriksen
Album: Josh Billings Voyage
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 13
Website: http://www.timeriksenmusic.com

Any new venture from adrenalin-fuelled mega-creative researcher, singer, musician and erstwhile Cordelia's Dad frontman Tim is bound to provide a stimulating and rewarding, while also refreshingly uncompromising, aural experience, and his latest defiantly independent release, Josh Billings Voyage, is no exception. It's a further compelling manifestation of Tim's perennial fascination with what he terms "the presence of the world in every place and the presence of every place in the world", far-flung connections that are part of a net of lived experience defying time and geographic distance.

Here on Josh Billings Voyage, Tim brings an impressive assortment of sparse instrumental backings to a kind of concept suite of songs that together purport to tell something of the story of a fictional New England village, Pumpkintown - but hey, although some of the settings are unorthodox, even weird, this is less Handsome Family than Cold Mountain, as the majority of the pieces are traditional in origin and several of them have crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic many times over, mirroring the collection's general theme of journeying and parting. For, as Tim rightly observes, "travel has more to do with how music develops than isolation does". Tim displays his tremendous gift for making the familiar seem unfamiliar by delivering typically pindrop, exhilaratingly earthy yet at the same time deeply insightful performances of this material. Tim's unique, trademark viscerally sonorous voice is as spellbinding as ever: entirely responsive to the texts, and reflecting their multiculturalism (in the genuine, ethno-musical sense) by telling their stories with a keen sense of adventure and enterprise that complements the special sense of place.

The patchwork ragbag of songs and tunes conjured by Tim includes several instances of intriguingly apposite, if at times idiosyncratic, scoring; Every Day Is Three, a version of My Dearest Dear, is atmospherically accompanied by exceedingly strange drones on bowed banjo and bowed glockenspiel, while How Come That Blood imaginatively brings both South Indian veena and bamboo fifes to its texture. A stomping banjo-backed holler-style rendition of Gabriel's Trumpet hints at the deep West African roots in many such New England hymns, while Bonny Bay Of Biscay becomes an animated and uncannily infectious singalong number. There's also a vigorous wordless rendition of The Lover's Mistake, stirringly backed by fiddle, glockenspiel and drum, and a pithy jew's-harp twang through Hindoo Air (aka There Is A Happy Land), while the ballad Mountains Of Pomeroy sports lonesome fiddle and drum from guests Laura Risk and Peter Irvine.

Tim has also lately been getting to grips with the Mexican bajo sexto (a fat 12-string bass), which makes key appearances taking the place of the standard acoustic guitar as a driving force on many of the tracks. Maybe the extended improvisation on Roslin Castle meanders a touch too far along the banks of the Ganges, but I did appreciate Tim's other curveball-wildcard entries. Best of which is a truly weird and wonderful, determinedly wilfully quirky self-penned song, The Mice, that inhabits a peculiar, twisty-turny musical universe as it takes his experience of finding a mouse's nest in a stereo speaker as a metaphor for our being baffled by what's going on and failing in our attempts to understand things (this track could've easily found a home as a Hangman's Beautiful Daughter outtake!). Tim's bold (if mildly punk-indulgent) reworking of Auld Lang Syne, here labelled Song Of The Old Folks, begins simply enough but halfway through the party is gatecrashed by both a full-electric indie rock band and the resident drunkard on trumpet (hearing is believing!) - some listeners may think that track crosses a bridge too far, but it's great fun, especially when it's followed by the rather moving a cappella closer When Shall We Meet Again ("penned by Native American 18th century college buddies", apparently) that's eventually subsumed by a persistent chorus of what sounds like peeper frogs… Eccentricity, musicianship and honest scholarship in glorious juxtaposition - seriously unmissable!

David Kidman