Jim Ghedi has history when it comes to tackling weighty subjects. The last we heard from him, in terms of solo albums, was 2021’s In the Furrows of the Commonplace, an angry and impassioned folk opus that sounded a dire warning about the dangers of environmental social collapse in a post-capitalist society. It was delivered through gritted teeth, often relying on a beautiful harmonic flourish or seamless forays into traditional song and the poetry of John Clare to convey its message, which was one of hope in a nearly hopeless world. Wasteland feels like a natural follow-up. Its themes are similar, but it is bigger, darker, stormier and more focused.
Ghedi has recently spent some time living in Ireland but moved back to his native Sheffield just before he began work on what would become Wasteland. And in many ways, it is an album about England, about its curious, disjointed history, its rich heritage of song and performance, and its scary and troubled present. The title is important: it would be easy to suggest that the wasteland in question is England in its current state, but there is a sense of presentiment, a prophetic strain to Ghedi’s songs that might imply that the worst is yet to come. This – the prophetic tone and the ambiguity – is something that the album shares with the T.S. Eliot poem whose title it mirrors.
It feels important that Wasteland was recorded in Sheffield, a vibrant city that has grappled with the effects of its own industrial past. It is surrounded by stunning natural beauty but bears the scars of mining and metalworking. Ghedi’s music is always aware of dichotomies like these, and it gives voice to that awareness by allowing experimental and exploratory songwriting to rub shoulders with the folk music of the past. So we get a song like opener Old Stones – a powerful original put together with an almost painterly flourish – next to What Will Become of England, a drone-heavy take on a traditional song that sounds a dire warning about unemployment, poor living conditions and the victimisation of the working class. Sound familiar?
Old Stones immediately establishes the overall mood, which is one of intensity. Ghedi’s voice swoops and rises around an imposing, metallic squall of electric guitar and David Grubb’s strings. The lyrics – multi-layered right from the off – seem to be talking about personal loss and grief but also the destruction of older and less transient forms of existence. A foreboding thump of percussion pulses through both of the first two songs, giving the album an air of inexorability right from the start.
Beauty of a more palatable and pastoral kind can be found too. Newtondale/John Blue’s is a pair of hornpipes which plunge from sweet melancholia into furious movement. Even the sweetest melodies here are subject to a thrilling intensity. Ghedi seems reluctant to let himself or his listeners rest for a second: understandable, really, given the importance of the message he is trying to convey. The title track is a deceptive slow-burner whose delicate verses give way to towering choruses strewn with rocky percussive outcrops. Here and across the album drummer Joe Danks makes his presence felt with an earthy, almost primal energy. Indeed, the production is big right across the board. Ghedi and co-producer David Glover have done a great job of scaling the sound up. There are no more than four or five musicians playing at any one point, but there is something immense about most of these songs. Although in terms of instrumentation they are often on the folk side of folk-rock, their presentation has something of the monolithic nature of heavier varieties of rock and prog.
Exceptions to the rule Just a Note – an unaccompanied first verse shows off Ghedi’s powerful and idiosyncratic vocal style before he is joined by Daniel Bridgwood-Hill’s mournful fiddle and Neal Heppleston’s sombre double bass – and The Seasons, a four-part a cappella rendition of a Joseph Campbell poem, whose power grows as more voices join.
But for the most part, there is a maximalist aesthetic at play. Sheaf and Feld is a crunching folk rocker with walls of electric guitar fleshed out further by Dean Honer’s synths. Hester is gentler and more personal, its heavier moments tempered by verses of quiet longing. The strings soar and stretch over the simple vocal refrain, and the song has an almost tidal ebb and flow to it. Wishing Tree shares the quiet-loud dynamic: Ghedi has an ear for dramatic progressions and he puts that to good use here, providing the perfect backdrop for a song that talks candidly about mental health but also indulges in surprising, poetic flights of fancy, almost gothic in their windswept grandeur.
Another outlier is the final track, a cover of Ewan MacColl’s Trafford Road Ballad, which loses none of the original’s humanity but dials up the atmosphere with a mournful passage of interplay between the acoustic guitar and fiddle. It’s an incredibly powerful, logical and clear-sighted anti-war song: to say that it’s as relevant now as ever before is a sad indictment of our times. Ghedi’s triumph is his ability to imbue a song like this with more than just anger or resignation. MacColl’s lyrics speak of a genuine love for his home town and for his fellow man, and Ghedi does well to find space for that love among the harsh realities at the heart of the song.
Harsh realities are a feature of the whole album. Ghedi has created a form of music that feels rooted in deep time, and that feeds off ancient natural energies but always confronts the most urgent contemporary issues with unflinching honesty. The wasteland is here; we are living in it. But we can still create moments of beauty. Wasteland, for all its anger and anguish, provides us with many such moments of beauty. It is a timely reminder of the potency of art in a world that seems to be turning uglier by the day, and it might just be Jim Ghedi’s masterpiece.
Live Session:
Wasteland (21st February 2025) Basin Rock
Pre-Order (Vinyl/CD/Digital):
https://jimghedi.bandcamp.com/album/wasteland
https://www.basinrock.co.uk/records/wasteland
March Tour dates:
4 Mar – Leeds @ The Attic
5 Mar – Birmingham @ Hare & Hounds
6 Mar – Sheffield @ Sidney and Matilda
7 Mar – Manchester @ Gullivers
10 Mar – Brighton @ DUST
11 Mar – London @ Moth Club
12 Mar – Oxford @ Common Ground
14 Mar – Bristol @ Rough Trade
15 Mar – Falmouth @ Church of King Charles the Martyr
Tickets: https://www.jimghedi.com/tour