Reviews

Artist:KB Bayley
Album: Little Thunderstorms
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.kbbayley.com

His influences spanning from Laurel Canyon era troubadours like Taylor and Prine to contemporary names like Isbell, Glover and Moreland, Geordie-born, Bayley is steeped in Americana, writing his songs and colouring them with dobro, lap steel old upright piano and cigar box guitars. Written prior the pandemic, all but two of the songs are self- penned, opening with the resonant sound of fingerpicked dobro on 'Cold Rain, sat in a church, "talking to the people with their names written on the ground" and musing on God's responsibility for all the shit that goes down, from plane crashes to breakups, putting a spin on Cohen's 'Anthem as he sings how "there's a hole in the sky where the night gets in", waiting for a cleansing rain and a slow train coming down the line.

From a Cohen allusion to a Dylan one, in the equally weather-related title track with is reference to "boots of Spanish leather", a song that (presumably set in Dumbarton given its mention of "dead dog bridge", an infamous site of canine suicides) relates to the singer picking up the "prettiest girl that I'd ever seen" on a rainy day, taking her to a bar and thinking "this love would last forever" only, of course, for those little thunderstorms of "the sound of breaking hearts".

There's more broken hearts, along with worn out toys and cold coffee in 'Throw It In The River' where, joined by Charlie Jonas Walter on pedal steel, he moves from wanting to help someone by throwing their hurt in the river and sheltering them until the storm passes to an image of a "street behind the church where the cardboard people sleep" and of troubled times wonderfully captured by the line "someone wrote a sign saying 'Jesus lives today'/I look around/I think he moved away".

Featuring Ben Glover on backing vocals, 'Blood Red Lullaby' opens with an announcer giving directions of travel through Dallas, the song proceeding to recall the JFK assassination before expanding into a wider reflection on America's lost innocence ("burglars in the chapel, bloodstains on the floor, the priest talked of atonement, he preached of judgment day") and from there to the death of someone with mental health issues ("one morning on the roof he thought he was a bird/the whispering of the rain was the last thing that he heard") and of the narrator wistfully remarking "she died when I was seven/I found out when I was nine/like everything I've loved and lost/she was never really mine", again ending with another poignantly striking line - "you think my eyes look sad tonight/you should see them from my side".

Perhaps his biggest influence is Tom Waits, evoked here with the piano and trumpet stained early hours smoky jazz of 'Night Dogs', the rain beating on the window of the Venus Motel where "the tv is broke like the rest of this town,but you can drink till your skin turns blue", where "whisky burns cold in the glass" and the broken souls on both sides of the bar linger over old photographs and dance with the ghosts of the past, "night dogs under the starlight/lost hearts looking for love/hawks on the wing chasing splashes of gin".

Musically, the tempo if not the narrative picks up with the acoustic fingerpicking of 'Time to Leave Town', another vignette populated by bruised lives, rain, whisky, coffee and the search for redemption as "a man goes looking through his reasons/he waits for things to change/he goes looking through his seasons/all he sees is rain".

Bayley on lap steel and GavinThomas on harmonica, the scene once more taps into his northern roots for the memory of a 'North Coast Girl' who "held me tight as the storms blew all around my world", unfolding against WWII with references to Marlene Dietrich and the dreaded sound of the "telegram boy knocking on your door", once more ending with a letting go "free to fly a long long way from here".

'Crazy About Me' is no cheerier, moving from love found ("were you looking for someone just like me/don't tell me why you fell in love with me/don't tell me why 'cause I don't care") to love lost ("don't tell me why you fell in love with him/don't tell me why 'cause I don't care/don't tell me all about your sunsets or his hair") to the sound of guitar, piano and violin.

However, Walter on banjo, the mood lifts to speak of the enduring nature of love, back at a church on the North Shore Road reading the names of those "who never made it back alive" but also of the loved ones remembered, of "all these lives we never knew", of "all the fathers and the daughters stood by this altar", of hearts shattered, but rebuilt with new foundations and of "all these loves inside these walls/all the lives that saw it all".

It closes with its two non-originals, a solo slide resonator instrumental arrangement of the traditional 'Wayfaring Stranger (Redux)' with an air of gothic American folk, and, finally, an acoustic and cigar box guitar take on Jeffrey Foucault's 'Cheap Suit', picking up the theme of passing the torch and embracing others that, one way or another, percolates the album, ending on a sense of light and hope after the storm clouds roll away.

Mike Davies

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