Michael Chapman – True North
Paradise of Bachelors – 8 February 2019
Michael Chapman’s second collaboration with guitar playing producer Steve Gunn is a very different affair to 50, his 2017 ‘American album’, although it certainly feels related. Like 50, North consists of old songs reimagined and originals, but this set is a sparser affair, mainly showcasing BJ Cole’s peddle steal (Cole is considered the album’s ‘secret weapon’, which is no overstatement) alongside Chapman and Gunn’s guitars and Sarah Smout’s spectral cello. 50 brought in a tight band of Paradise of Bachelor regulars to perform the songs, which, with Gunn’s steady touch, resulted in tight arrangements but certainly with a full band feel. North feels more spacious, with the songs being built on cyclical acoustic guitar lines with fewer adornments. If 50 was a celebration album, True North could be considered the sound of an artist approaching eighty years old bringing a true representation of his creative status at the moment to light. The result, much like John Prine’s recent Tree of Forgiveness album, is raw and honest and all the more powerful for it.
Mortality rears its head immediately on this set, with opener ‘It’s too Late’ (one of four originals) announcing that ‘there’s ghosts out in the corridor of this broken down hotel’ alongside a melancholy guitar refrain. When he sings ‘if only time was on my side’ and ‘sometimes no disguise is the best disguise of all’ unaccompanied on ‘Vanity & Pride’, with the vocal gruff and the playing slowed, you really feel the point of this album. Again on ‘Youth is Wasted on the Young’, with ‘there are so many things that we could have done / so many songs that we left unsung’; where 50 was triumphant, with big songs given rousing arrangements, True North is a work from a musician well aware of the legacy behind him and his place on that timeline. But what comes across clearest while listening to this album is that with the honesty in the stripped back songs letting the man at the centre breathe comes real beauty. Be it with new instrumental track ‘Eleuthera’, a masterpiece of poised acoustic playing with a shimmering pedal steel part from Cole, carrying the listener off, or the wide-open landscapes of travelling piece ‘Truck Song’, with the narrator perceptive and quietly awe-struck, these songs have been put to tape with consideration and intelligence.
But perhaps the most affecting piece of the lot is ‘Caddo Lake’, a six-minute instrumental from his 2000 Americana album. The music here is pensive, with Smout’s cello and Cole’s pedal steel played low alongside a pondering guitar line. The mood shifts and alters and then runs seamlessly into the vocal led ‘Hell to Pay’, with Chapman thumbing an ominous bass line and exhaling portents like ‘I know what this is, this is trouble in the night’. After the melancholy serenity of ‘Caddo Lake’, ‘Hell to Pay’ is a pessimistic warning to all those complacent: ‘This could be heaven, but there’ll be hell to pay’. The small arsenal of instruments and players help these songs hang together beautifully, as the subtle but significant shift from ‘Caddo Lake’ to ‘Hell to Pay’ perhaps best demonstrates, and I think it is this point which sets True North apart even from its relative, 50. The strength of the songs, the simplicity of the strong acoustic guitar core matched with sympathetic and skilful playing throughout results in an album that is lean, unpretentious, wonderfully played and so very listenable throughout.
Michael Chapman Live Dates
14/02/2019 London – Rough Trade East
27/03/2019 Hebden Bridge – The Trades Club
28/03/2019 Preston – The Continental
30/03/2019 York – The Crescent Community Venue
31/03/2019 Newcastle on Tyne – The Cluny 2
01/04/2019 Birmingham – The Kitchen Garden Cafe
02/04/2019 Guildford – Holy Trinity Church
03/04/2019 Sheffield – The Greystones
04/04/2019 Chester – St Mary’s Creative Space
05/04/2019 London – The Lexington
06/04/2019 Reading – South St Arts
Ticket links and details http://www.michaelchapman.co.uk/concerts.htm
