(2021)Joe Tilston - Tightrope


Review:
Following closely on the heels of Martha Tilson’s recent album, Random Hand bassist brother Joe Tilston offers up his second solo offering, Tightrope. The album kicks off with the gradually building self-explanatory titled ‘A Love Song Too Late’, featuring Tia Kalmaru on flute. The first of three lengthy numbers, ‘Flowers’, a musing on mortality (“tick tock goes the clock that we’re watching”), is a more propulsive, galloping drums affair nodding to his punk roots. At the same time, a similar musical sensibility (New Model Army came to mind) anchors ‘Armistice Day’, a soldier’s reflection on his combat days and lost comrades built around a circling, tumbling guitar pattern giving way to a slower pace with military trumpet flourishes. ‘Evergreen’ is a simple guitar and piano love song to his wife that conjures a dusty Sandy Denny cum Richard Thompson feel. Fingerpicked guitar deceptively opens the eco doomsday clock themed Minutes To Midnight before Sean Howe’s drums shift the pace into fifth gear. Kalmaru steps up to the microphone to share vocals on the circling, fingerpicked, wistful, reflective end of a relationship/isolation-themed To Continue Press Start (“since when did we dance alone my friend”). An a capella intro preceding the heavy drums, bass throb and electric guitar riffs opens Eyes On The Road, a song concerning an abusive relationship from which the woman is unable to extricate herself. The album’s mood then transforms for the far folksier, fiddle flavoured Mirror Mirror, again with Thompson hints and a lurching midsection bridge before returning to the folk-rock swirl. The last of the five-minute numbers, Rains, starts with strummed acoustic, drums and violin joining, proceeding for a brooding, edgy number that echoes the earlier apocalyptic intimations, a calm before the gathering storm as his voice builds in intensity. Finally, again shaded by flute, the strummed acoustic Walking On Walls takes it down for introspective reflections (“every time I try write I choke, even with the joy it brings it’s hard to sing when the words feel like a rope”), feeling compelled into joining in with those singing songs of loss instead of love, a song about asking why we succumb to the pressure and darkness and why “we’re afraid to stand tall”. The album concerns walking that tightrope between despair and hope; as such, it casts Tilston very much as folk’s answer to Charles Blondin.





Track Listing:
1.A Love Song Too Late 03:48
2.Flowers 05:28
3.Armistice Day 05:37
4.Evergreen 02:47
5.Minutes To Midnight 03:40
6.To Continue Press Start 04:38
7.Eyes On the Road 05:00
8.Mirror Mirror 04:35
9.Rains 05:09
10.Walking On Walls 03:33


Media Report:
Genre: folk-rock
Country: UK
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