How much mileage can there be in the 'bloke with guitar singing his own songs' format? It must, one would think, be a fairly redundant formula what with this being the twenty first century and everything. Bring us something new, fresh, exciting, and erm...different. Been there, heard that, blah... blah... blah....

Yes, that's all perfectly understandable. A very reasonable argument in fact. But:

Then there come records like this. What we are dealing with here is a thing of utter outstanding, understated beauty. It's the sound of an artist who had been in and out and around and about arriving at a point where to do anything more than play the songs and sing them is futile since the songs and the singing are the point of the whole exercise. Put simply it's 'the music'. What more do you need than to be able to play a bit, to sing a bit and to express your poetry through the simplest of muses. Like all the best artists' work there is an 'economy of line' used here. It's not so much a simplification as a lack of extraneous detail, a restraint, the suggestion of things rather than a stating of the obvious. Amazingly for a thing honed from such a sparse palette there is a warmth and richness evident which you can't account for in Pro Tools, that a heavier production hand might have obscured and which gives the undertaking an organic quality. Not only that but repeated plays reveal textures, musical minutiae if you will, that make it a pleasure to hear again and again â€" a flicked guitar string here, an intelligent piece of word play there. Embellishments, such as they are, come in the form of acutely informed collaborations: Richard Thompson sings and plays, Carlos Guitarlos 'harmonises', Duane Jarvis adds a little percussion...and there are a couple of others whose performances, like those mentioned, are dotted about the record accentuating the odd detail, counterpointing or contrasting as necessary.

This is a virtuoso performance where the virtuosity is in what isn't in the performance. Outstanding.

- Paul Villers, Americana UK