(Damaged Goods/Shock)

If a landslide unearths old things, this is it

Already picked up by many Brits as one to watch in 2008, Pete Molinari is a Londoner with an exotic background (Malta, Italy and Egypt) who somehow fell for an earlier, backblocks era of Americana. So much so that I suspect he’d prefer to actually be back there rather than trying to drag it into the 21st century in some kind of voguish retro-ism. He even spent two years in the U.S. visiting the haunts once favoured by the beat poets and folkies all those years ago. This second album takes a step up from the recording of his first one in Billy Childish’s kitchen with a sojourn to the very hip but vintage-sounding Toe Rag Studios with its owner Liam Watson producing. And though he’s dropped the Hank Williams and Bob Dylan covers, that old atmosphere persists, from the dry folk waft of Look What I Made to the creaky tones of God Damn Lonesome Blues to the rockabilly twang of Adelaine to the dusty country waltz of Angelina. On one level, it’s as anachronistic as they come, as if these songs had arrived via a time warp from 40 or 50 or more years ago. But it’s Molinari’s respect for the forms that makes this sound so authentic and so real.

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BILL HOLDSWORTH

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