(2021) Son of the Velvet Rat - Solitary Company


Review:
Given the competition, being named Best Austrian Singer/Songwriter ever is kind of damning George Altziebler with faint praise. And while he and his wife Heike Binder have had two albums named Austrian Album of the Year, neither of them actually made the native Top 40. This isn’t meant to be a put-down, just to underline that they deserve far more than such parochial praise. Having been based in Joshua Tree, California, for the past 8 years, this is the duo’s third album since relocating and again reinforces their compelling brand of Euro-Americana folk-noir, Altziebler’s tremulous, whisperingly intimate vocal style an intoxicating cocktail of Lou Reed, Dylan, Guy Clark and, even Donovan circa ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’. He plays guitars and harmonica, she handles organ, accordion and autoharp, while assorted musicians variously pepper the arrangements with acoustic bass, brass, violins, percussion and, yes, hurdy-gurdy, the album gets underway, Bob Furgo on fiddle and piano, with the lovely, brushed snare Celtic slow march sway of a Cohenesque Alicia as he sings “I’m the paintbrush, not the painter” and of “just another tourist town” where “even the rain is watered down”. There’s more of a desert mood to the title track, a quiveringly sung lonely on the road number set in New York’s Carlton Arms Hotel as he watches a couple making love through the window, with strings, hammered piano, and hurdy-gurdy with Sebastian Rochford’s steady drumbeat providing the heavy clouds, the darkly romantic Stardust kicking up proceedings with whistling theremin, urgent drums and scampering rhythm. Again namechecking actual locations, namely the road leading to their regular bar, When The Lights Go Down has a musical atmosphere and weariness akin to Knocking on Heaven’s Door as it spins out a film noir scenario (“Wash the blood away/From your fingernails/Get rid of the gun”) as, fuzz guitar compounding the mood, he concludes that “we’re all the same when the lights go down”. Riding organ and harmonica, Beautiful Disarray is a relatively rockier affair where those casual Reed influences come into play, acoustic bass introducing the brushed snare, resonator guitar slow sparse gravelly shuffle 11&9 which, being the date of the couple’s anniversary, is naturally a love song (“you make me a better man”) featuring backing vocals from the Blind Boys Of The Desert. Stripped back to just voice and acoustic guitar The Waterlily & The Dragonfly is another dark veined love song, here couched in ecosystem imagery while Only Child leans on the melody to Hey Joe/Hurdy Gurdy Man, Fender Rhodes and e-bow colouring his husked rasp as he sings how “I came so far for your broken tunes, diamonds & tar, birthmarks and scars is what they are”. By contrast to everything that’s gone before, the penultimate Ferris Wheel, which features producer Gar Robertson on acoustic guitar and mandolin, is a jaunty life’s a carnival harmonica blowing high slapper hoedown. Proceedings come to a close on the cymbal roll into the reflective, melancholic beauty of Remember Me with its dust-coated slide guitar, doleful hurdy-gurdy, a haunting song about a fisherman growing old, the loneliness of an empty nest and memories that ends with the heartwrenching “Their voices still echo in the cry of the seagull/Their toys are still out there in the autumn rain/I still hear their little feet on the staircase/ & I know in my heart I will see them again”. Redolent of the stark beauty of their Mojave home, it’s their finest yet. An album of the year, Austrian or otherwise.





Tracklist:
01 - Alicia
02 - Solitary Company
03 - Stardust
04 - When the Lights Go Down
05 - Beautiful Disarray
06 - 11 & 9
07 - The Waterlily & the Dragonfly
08 - The Only Child
09 - The Ferris Wheel
10 - Remember Me


Media Report:
Genre: folk-rock, indie-folk
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