Joshua Burnside – Wear Bluebells In Your Hat If You’re Goin’ That Way
Quiet Arch – 11 January 2019
Belfast troubadour Joshua Burnside has resurrected his 2013 home-recorded digital EP If You’re Goin’ That Way and repackaged it with four new songs and an acoustic version of one of the original tracks, releasing it digitally and on vinyl. The original EP material is frontloaded, running from the lurching, pizzicato banjo-backed Little Blind with its prog playout through the work song hand-clap rhythm Black Dog Sin, slowly gathering to a raggy cabaret waltz, August 1973 with its Incredible String Band echoes and the scratchy slow march Half Homes. The woozy, military snare pinned Desert Wine with its fluttering percussion and organ drone gets a second outing, reworked as a fingerpicked acoustic number, an approach that characterises the four new numbers rather than the EP’s more experimental shades.
These kick off with the spare strum of Drive In Another Time where early Dylan and the ISB share space, the former’s influence also particularly in evidence on Mean Man, while, featuring double tracked vocals, the circling guitar patterns of Platonia is more about nakedly acoustic fingerpicking, concluding with the simple strum of the drinking-themed One More, the wearied verses offset by the brief chorus surge.
Decidedly more stripped down to the basics than his recent debut album and EP, whether this marks a continuing musical journey or just a brief digression, remains to be seen.
http://www.joshuaburnside.com/