Rory Butler – Window Shopping
Vertical records – 10 July 2020
A rising new star in the Scottish folk firmament, Rory Butler’s already notched up an impressive raft of support slots, opening for, among others Richard Thompson, Paul Weller and John Paul White. Written and recorded between London and hometown Edinburgh, Window Shopping is his debut album and much is fuelled by his frustration with cyber-reality and the way it desensitises human interaction and attitudes to very real issues.
The nimbly fingerpicked opening track Tell Yourself, featuring Matt Ingram on drums and Tom Mason’s double bass, is a wry take on friendship as he remarks on how his girl and his friend won’t leave him, keeping him grounded even though everyone says he’s about to lose it. Hinting at his John Martyn influences, Lost and Found explores a similar theme as he sings “you should open up your heart to being lost and found”, essentially about making our own decisions in matters of the heart.
Inspired by a series of photographs by Eric Pickersgill of people glued to their phones, with the devices edited out of their hands, Mind Your Business takes a lazing bluesy approach to the disconnect as he asks “what is it with my generation?”, living their lives online, noting how “I could know everybody here/Where you all were last year”, somewhat caustically adding how “it makes you feel better when you’re on display”.
Yet, by contrast, inspired by seeing the photo of a Syrian child refugee washed up on a Mediterranean beach, the fingerpicked That Side Of The World contradicts the idea that social media can have a numbing effect, the shared image serving as a far more effective wake up call than anonymous statistics and data, forcing viewers into the reality rather than ignoring it, or as he puts it “stop this man. He isn’t part of the plan that we should never see hell”. Indeed, China is a good example of how suppressing social media platforms keeps a population ignorant of abuses and such crises.
One of the album’s catchiest tracks (this time calling Ralph McTell’s guitar work to mind), Simon Says rides a handclap rhythm echoing the positivity in the line “everything can be mine/If I only just look the right way” and not “live life letting life live you”. It’s back to Martyn-like blues for the slightly slurringly sung and slightly menacing Straight Talking Man, Ingram’s percussion adding muscle behind the forceful guitar work, getting moodier with the circling guitar pattern and drum stumbles of Cigarettes In Silence, the first of two consecutive numbers songs co-written with Crispin Hunt, formerly of The Longpigs (from whence came Richard Hawley) and now Chair of the British Academy of Songwriters. Although, like many of the lyrics there’s a tendency to be impressionistic, it’s basically about about breaking free of a life seen through a lens, in this case the ideas and aspirations reality TV promotes in impressionable minds where the city’s full of “guys like me smoking cigarettes in silence” and “nothing seems better than the high sky games and violence”.
The title track takes more of a shuffling approach, Ingram’s drums again the bedrock underpinning the circular guitar chimes and Butler providing his own backing vocals, the influences here seeming a cocktail of Mitchell and Simon on a song about being “underpaid and overqualified”, of not having the money to buy what you see and about getting up the nerve to talk to that coffee shop woman because, after all, the worst she can do is turn you down, although this isn’t abut not chatting her up, it’s about trying to get work
It’s perhaps a happy accident that the following choppy percussive rhythm and the delicately strummed track is titled Lynda’s Café, its theme about the closure of small music venues striking a particularly timely note, the album ending with its longest track, the quite beautiful and wonderfully wistfully sung five-minute fingerpicked, slow waltzing brushed snares shuffle Have I Come Down, my personal favourite, where the verses brilliantly balance the lines “have I wasted all my young years/ thinking of my path?” and “have I wasted all my older years/thinking of my past?” Butler’s just starting out, but if he keeps up the sort of quality evidenced here, he’ll not be looking back on a career where anything was wasted. Don’t sit there looking at the sleeve, go inside and buy.
Order Window Shopping via Amazon
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