Graham Reid | | 1 min read
Someday Soon
Auckland's Rattle label has had more than 30 years of releasing innovative contemporary classical and avant-garde music, taonga puoro albums as well as jazz, innovative electro-acoustic sounds and . . .
Easier perhaps to say what Rattle hasn't released (rock, reggae).
Singer-songwriters haven't been in the label's orbit, but then in 2021 it went with the 9 Rooms album by Stewart Allen and now this by Auckland's Guy Wishart.
As with Allan – well-known in New Zealand in the late Eighties/early Nineties before moving to Australia -- Wishart's name will be mostly familiar to those who remember his mid-late Eighties albums, particularly 1990's Don't Take Me For Granted which saw him nominated as best male vocalist in the music awards and picking up the Silver Scroll (songwriting) award for the title track.
Then there was a considerable gap (he too went overseas, to the UK) and in the 2000s back home he was in the band Selon Recliner.
After four more years overseas he returned again and recorded West by North which won best folk album in 2017.
Now he steps out again as one of the few singer-songwriters on Rattle with a sophisticated collection of originals and a small coterie of longtime friends as his band (drummer Michael Te Young, bassists Vernon Rive and Andrew Horst) and backing singers.
Wishart's inclination is to the downbeat and a world-battered weariness: the opener Where The Water Runs Through (“somewhere past 18 I must have broken my head, now I'm not so good at making it up”) sets a tone as Darlene Te Young's backing vocals offers a repeated, yearning “oh ohoh oh”.
Elsewhere his Americana-influenced songs arrive as quietly reflective (the crafted, minimally melodic Hold Me To Your Fire), Nebraska-era Springsteen-like snapshots (Kick It On Down, Holy Bullets of Love), insightful perspectives (the woman's view of a jealous, angry man on Lighten Up) and haunting folk (She Had To Go Home, his solo closer Beneath the Waves).
The core of these songs is an introspective, probing Wishart on acoustic guitar but the embellishments from atmospheric keyboards (Rive), Weissenborn guitar (Glenn Ross Campbell) and electric guitar (Peter Diprose) are discreet and tastefully understated.
Throughout there is an ineffable sense of loss, sadness, women wounded and an uncertain heart hoping that love and rest, so fragile and often in doubt, are just around the bend.
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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here
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