D.C Cross – Hot-wire the Lay-low (Australian Escapist Pieces for Guitar)
Independent – Out Now
Australian picker Darren Cross’s third album of solo guitar music comes from a place of travel and solitude, harnessing life’s recent restrictions and finding art in simplicity during the strangest time most of us can remember. The result of these pensive writings is a fine acoustic album appropriately recorded simply with no overdubs or studio nonsense.
Although Cross is clearly ingrained in the Tacoma school of guitar playing, with strong rhythmic picking firmly underpinning many of the tunes here, his style is also finely nuanced and diverse, as he demonstrates across ten songs.
Things start relatively quickly with the first three tracks, good examples of firm and solid picking fingers and an adventurous fretting hand. Once Lithgow Pink has warmed up, it has fun with some quickly played parts and a lightness of touch. Cootamundra starts more menacing, with low-end strings picking an undulating tune before thumbed bass notes harness a deft and sweet melody. After the pacey Stolen Police Car down the Great Western Highway has continued the theme, the slower tempo of At Night those Black Mountains Disappear, suggests a more patient and introspective mid-section, a welcome shift that shows us a different side to Cross’s sound. The playing here is as precise as before, but there is more space opened up by less notes being used, which makes the music more interesting.
Further on, Freenik Vs the Alt-Wrongers is another more deliberate piece, using a minor scale in places to emphasise a sense of melancholy and uncertainty. It’s at these moments that ideas of solitude and anxiety from recent months that lay behind the concept of the album come more sharply into focus, and the record is at its strongest. This feeling of anxiety comes through again on the meaty nine-minute Birthday Dread, but the following song, South Albury Take-away before the Big Rip-off (love these titles), trumps it with a friendly melody full of that lovely semi-melancholy emotion. There is plenty of hope here, but there may be a little way to go. It’s lovely and leads us nicely into the final track Old Princess Highway, which returns to some of the pace and attitude shown at the beginning of the album. It ends on an ace display of solo instrumental guitar music from a player with plenty to say and all the skills to say it.
Order via Bandcamp: https://darrencross.bandcamp.com/album/hot-wire-the-lay-low-australian-escapist-pieces-for-guitar