Description
The masterful follow-up to his universally celebrated 2017 album 50, Michael Chapmans True North finds the elder statesman of British song writing and guitar plumbing an even deeper deep and honing an ever keener edge to his iconic writing. This authoritative set of predominantly new, and utterly devastating, songs hews to a more intimate sonic signaturemore atmospheric, textural, and minimalist than 50, stately and melancholy in equal measure.
Recorded in rural West Wales, True North unflinchingly surveys home and horizon, traveling from the Bahamas to Texas to the Leeds of Chapmans childhood, haunted by the mirages of memory and intimations of mortality. Joining him on this introspective journey is a cast of old friends and new disciples: once again Steve Gunn produces and plays guitar, and fellow UK song writing hero Bridget St John sings, collaborating with cellist Sarah Smout and legendary pedal steel player BJ Cole, who has accompanied everyone from John Cale to Scott Walker, Elton John to Terry Allen, Felt to Björk.
The album begins with the gnawing regret of Its Too Late, and every song Chapman sings thereafter directly references the passing of timeits blind ruthlessness, its sweet hazy delights in noirish language almost mystical in its terseness and precision. (The two transportive, gorgeous instrumentals, one per side, both have appropriately evocativethough decidedly not Northernpastoral place names for titles: Eleuthera is an island in the Bahamas where Chapman habitually holidays every winter, and Caddo Lake straddles the border between Texas and Louisiana.)
This is Chapman at his darkest and most nocturnal, yes, but also his most elegant and subtle, squinting into the black hours with an unseen smile. By the time True North is out in the world, Chapman will be seventy-eight years old and will have released nearly as many records, a staggering achievement. True North represents the most nakedly personal album of his career, his most authoritative, unguarded, and emotionally devastating statement.
His universally celebrated full-band 2017 album 50 flirted with much-deserved triumphalism, offering a retrospective of his illustrious career, revisited in the company of the fellow UK song writing hero Bridget St John and a rowdy gang of younger acolytes including Steve Gunn, James Elkington, and Nathan Bowles. The production hearkens back to Chapmans classic Millstone Grit (1973), as well as recalling Bob Dylans Time Out of Mind (1997); True North shares something of that albums spectral gloaming, midnight heartache, and sly, self-knowing winks. Compared to 50, these recordings feel narrower in range, less overtly narrative and dynamic and more impressionistic and restrained, but they are correspondingly more piercing and arrow-like in their rending impact, more concerned with an archers deadeye aim than pyrotechnics. Whereas 50 featured two new songs among radical reinterpretations of material from Chapmans deep catalogue, True North includes twice as many new numbers among its quiver of eleven arrows Its Too Late, Eleuthera, the fiery Bluesman, and slow-rolling album centre piece Truck Song confirming the exultant return of Chapman the songwriter. The other songs were selected from various obscure corners of Chapmans vast catalogue (Youth Is Wasted on the Young was previously recorded with Thurston Moore and Jim ORourke for a compilation, for example.) In these renderings they receive their definitive treatments, utterly transformed.
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A rich, haunting, collection of forlorn love songs, apocalyptic picaresques, and bewitching instrumentals that marks the latest stage in a remarkable career renaissance by the godfather of new cosmic Americana The Guardian
Beatific. Haunted by memories & auguries, & communicating something of their uncanny twilight power MOJO
A finely tuned piece that surveys the looming thunderclouds of mortality and the biblical gloom of the times, and quietly, unshowily transcends both Uncut
A late-career triumph [of] mystery and weight The Times
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