(2020) Ed Askew - London


Review:
In his eightieth year on this planet, Ed Askew is still making music with astonishing vitality, at a rate that doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Two months ago the New York-based songwriter gave us a seven-song EP, 2020, that ranks among his best work. There were three more EPs and a bunch of singles in 2019, all of them a similarly high quality, and his discography is beginning to resemble a hotel of many rooms, each one a little different from the last and each worth dwelling in for a while. Since moving to New York in the 1980s, Askew has grown to embody and reflect the city. His music (as well as his visual art – he studied painting at Yale and designs much of his own cover art) seems to be descended from the lost vision of the Big Apple embodied by Robert Rauschenberg or Frank O’Hara, and he is both an outsider and frequent collaborator. In 2017, Alex Neilson of the innovative psych-folk favourites Trembling Bells booked Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band and Ed Askew to join him for a Summer of Love Anniversary tour. Ed, along with pianist Jay Pluck, were frequently joined by the group onstage. The combo worked, and they decided to document it in the studio. The result is London, a wonderful six-song collection spanning Askew’s long career (and including two brand new songs) which was recorded by Owen Pratt in Hackney. The oldest songs come from 1968 when Askew released Ask the Unicorn, the album that would go on to be hailed as a kind of lost-and-found psych-folk classic. The title track is represented here, complete with gently warped electric guitar, and thanks to Askew’s warm, time-cracked voice it sounds better than ever. Ask The Unicorn also had a less well-known shadow-album, Little Eyes, which was recorded at the same time but remained unreleased until 2005, and whose title track gets a welcome run-out here. It’s full of poppy piano chords and a melancholy, melodic chorus that the Beatles would have been proud of and a combination of wandering harmonica and tight percussion that places it somewhere between Blonde on Blonde and The Basement Tapes. Of the new songs, Coast To Coast is a sprawling, piano-led ballad, swelling with Jordan Hunt’s violin but carried by Askew’s voice, confiding and beguiling. Little Clouds is even longer, a slow atmospheric cascade of piano and guitar. Askew looks down from an aeroplane on the dance of the clouds below him, before building a surreal and corruscating lyrical world, a world he observes from above but can never fully free himself from. He employs the full force of his imagistic lyricism and artist’s eye for colour, but the most striking thing about his songwriting, here and elsewhere, is how vulnerable it is, how uncertain. Even after six decades of songwriting there are no easy answers. On Starlight In Brooklyn – a track from 2012 – Askew ruminates on touring and the idea of home, creating a tender love letter to his city and his way of life. And closing song Roadio Rose (which has been a live favourite for a while) takes us on an even more impressive journey. It is a character study and road movie, full of black riders, silver chains, snowy white nights. The construction of this version is perfect; the music builds from a minimal base (the harmonica-laden intro could come from one of the slower songs on Neil Young’s On The Beach) and grows into a kind of sad country-pop ballad. The quiet release of the final chorus alone is a triumph of songwriting and arrangement, given further weight by the sympathetic build and break of Alex Neilson’s drumming, while Mike Hastings’ guitar is the quiet mirror of Jay Pluck’s piano. Askew’s career has been built on his ability to confound the structures that such a career would usually require. His arty pop songs about physical love and emotional attachment, travel and home, are full of brilliantly observed detail. In the Trembling Bells, those songs have found a match that is perhaps unexpected but nonetheless perfect. London is yet another indispensable document in a body of work that is always expanding in different directions, and if there were any justice in the world it would cement Askew’s place as one of our most valuable songwriters.





Tracklist:
01 - Little Eyes
02 - Coast to Coast
03 - Little Clouds
04 - Starlight in Brooklyn
05 - Ask the Unicorn
06 - Roadio Rose


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk
Source: CD
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits