Albums of the Year # 30 James Yorkston - The Wide, Wide River

 

 

So January is running its course. And the weather, in my part of the world at least, is making some kind of recovery. This is good news. As is the arrival of several excellent new record releases which offer scope for optimism for another good year for music, despite all the obstacles and difficulties that the music industry, and more importantly, musicians are beset with right now.

Take James Yorkston's latest The Wide, Wide River. one of the best things I've heard thus far in 2021. Yorkston is something of a wizened stalwart by now, generally tagged with a Folk label, not altogether innapropriately, but his records have a lot more to offer. This one in particular is grained with a subtle and nuanced pop sensibility that reminded me at various points of The Beatles and Blue Nile as well as more obvious forbears like John Martyn, Van Morrison and Leonard Cohen.

Much of the record has the delightful sense of travel and momentum. Taking a cross country train on a fresh spring day and watching the countryside pass outside the window like a dream. Yorkston has gathered an ensemble made up of like-minded musicians and companion backing vocalists. The guitars often have the gentle, ringing timbre that The Byrds added to the mix. Every track seems to have an assured conviction a clear sense of where it's going that we, in the words of R.E.M's Driver 8, will reach our destination.

Yorkston himself is at the heart of the mix. This is a team effort for sure, but there is never any doubt as to who is conducting operations.But he's a benevolent dictator and there is little doubt as song follows song about just how much reward and recompense everyone here is getting from the experience.

Songs that gather and mount and bloom with perfect and bonteous grace. A record that offers rich pickings indeed. An album of eight songs, all journeys of sorts, that has taken me into reverie, listening to it on headphones on a Sunday morning, bright sunlight splaying patterns on the desk in my living room. 2021 might not be so bad after all.