Richard Haswell has been making music in Edinburgh for at least ten years. This album is one of 18 releases to date, although it is reported to be his first in three years.
It is available via Pay Pal from his own website and the discerning people at Woven Wheat Whispers have also taken his work to their folk music hearts.
The folk connection is strongest on the final track of THE JULIUS WORK CALENDAR. "The Banks Of Claudy" is a fine old song. My personal favourite version was sung by Shirley Collins with the ALBION COUNTRY BAND on their magnificent 1971 album "No Roses". As here, that album used electric guitar and a drum kit to breathe new life into the old song.
But given 36 years of development since that peak of folk rock excitement, RHUBARB isn't offering much to turn heads or prick up ears, elegant and appealing though this version surely is.
The problem for me is Haswell's rather mournful and colourless voice. It doesn't have the musical richness of a Bill Callahan, the uncompromising force of a Frankie Sparo, or the enchanting vulnerability of a Robert Wyatt. It is simply Haswell's voice, an anonymous instrument with a light Scots accent that evokes (for me, at least) no particular engagement. Opening track "Forest Fear" distorts the voice in a very uncomfortable way - reminiscent of some of Mark Linkous's work. But where Linkous plays around with hiding the seduction of deep beauty, RHUBARB has a bitterness that is being disguised with even rougher edges. The result is not immediately beguiling. Working hard to listen out for the words, the themes are apocalyptic and anxious, echoing Dylan's obsessions in songs like"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and "The Ballad of Hollis Brown". Mining them out from the song is very difficult indeed. The distortion is unpleasant and the level is lower than it needs to be. "Too soon I will falter, too soon I will bleed" he seems to conclude, in a forced tone that suggests a desperate rage.
On a song like "Too Close To See" where the lyric starts out very clear it's still difficult to follow the sense of what is being sung about. The mood of reluctant, disappointed despair is a constant. Time is passing, suffering is being endured, Job's comfort is being accepted. But the poetry is too allusive, too disconnected, too inaudible to draw me in.
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"Perfect Parallel" seems to sing of unrequited love. But the muddle of lines is so perplexing and the imagery so disjointed that it might as well be written in another language. "From a peak of a mountain / to a dark and deeper well we'll take middle ground in perfect parallel / yeh we'll take middle ground in perfect parallel" makes no sense to me, especially as we have already had lines about following at a distance and not closing blinds in a sunlit room an deach day bringing new life and no one else knowing the feelings we hide. As the songs follow each other I feel increasingly frustrated at the opaque and unexplained unhappiness that is being held up for me to suffer. or empathise with. I see that other critics are reported as responding much more positively - so I conclude that not everyone will experience the same levels of discomfort as I have.
The instrumentation is adventurously varied - and I guess that it is all played by Haswell himself but it doesn't offer much in the way of diversion from the incoherent misery of the songs. The drumming (A sample from Led Zeppelin apart) is a little heavy handed - especially on "52nd State" (in itself a title that sounds as though it ought to mean something but which is given no contextual or other clues in a stream of discontinuous images).
www.worldofrhubarb.co.uk
www.wovenwheatwhispers.co.uk/
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