For the next 24 hours we’ll be streaming Chris T-T‘s new album 9 Green Songs which drops tomorrow via Xtra Mile Recordings. The album was recently reviewed by Helen who summed it up as follows:
By turns sardonic, polemical, articulate, funny and vulnerable, 9 Green Songs is an exhilarating white-knuckle ride through the technicolour daydreams and feverish nightmares that inform the worldview of one Britain’s most singular creative people. File under uneasy listening for turbulent times. Read the full review here
Album Stream: 9 Green Songs
9 Green Songs captures the vulnerable fury that bore the grassroots, folk-influenced approach of 9 Red Songs (an album that still resonates 10 years later), adding a modern Twitter feed tick-list of ideas, charged by the energy of his recent work with the Hoodrats. If anything T-T is becoming lyrically more radical. ‘Love Me, I’m a Liberal’ brutally indicts clicktivist sensibilities and “me, me” sensitivity of hipsters on social media, displaying their colours and doing not much else. ‘Cutting A Longbow’ recalls the spoken word live favourite ‘M1 Song’, in sound if not in content. Even then, this vocal diatribe is driven by pummelling percussion, giving it a rare menace. This contrasts wonderfully with ‘A Garden On The Motorway’; an upbeat fairytale of green-fingered warfare on concrete commuting. But whether he’s looking inward at his own faults or loudly gesturing at how we can all do better with less, T-T has put melodies to his disappointment, textures to our hypocrisy and, perhaps, a little hope in his hurt.
Chris hasn’t been sitting on his hands all this time while conservatives (yes, small c) do their darnedest. Since The Bear he’s toured extensively; released a gorgeous duet album of cover songs with folkie friend Gill Sandell (Walk Away, Walk Away); and even became the first Creative Fellow at a National Trust property – The Workhouse in Southwell – where in between tours he’ll compose new ballads of Victorian poverty.
After two excellent, tonally different albums – the treatise on the heart and gorgeous wordplay of Love Is Not Rescue and the full-tilt tumultuous 90s alt-rock instrumentation with the Hoodrats, of The Bear – with 9 Green Songs we finally get more of what brought a lot of people to his music in the first place: Chris T-T stands up to shout loudly again, looks outwards, like a warm, terrible, friendly menace, who sees both dystopia and redemption on the horizon.
9 Green Songs is released via Xtra Mile Recordings on 3rd June 2016
Tour Dates
June
3 Somerset Barton Inn
4 Lewes Union Music Store (Instore)
5 Bristol Café Kino
8 London Free Fringe Benefit At The Bedford
9 Birmingham Tba
10 Manchester Star & Garter
11 Nottingham Tba
12 Glasgow Hug & Pint
18 Brighton Big Green Gig At Green Door Store
Supporting Jim Bob:
NOVEMBER
24 Leeds Brudenell
25 Middlesbrough Westgarth Social Club
26 Manchester Deaf Institute
27 Devizes The Lamb
29 Cambridge Portland Arms
30 Leicester Musician
DECEMBER
1 Darwen Theatre Library
2 Glasgow Hug & Pint
3 Birmingham the Rainbow Courtyard
4 Reading Purple Turtle
6 Cardiff Globe
7 Bristol the Thunderbolt
8 Brighton The Haunt
9 London 100 Club