Reviews
Artist:Noel Dashwood Album: Noel Dashwood
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 9
Website: https://www.facebook.com/noel.dashwood.1/
One of the UK's leading dobro players, Dashwood has chalked up impressive credits as a sideman and was also one third of Norwich trio Alden, Patterson and Dashwood. This though, now based on Tresco in the Scilly Isles with wife Justyna, is his solo debut album and offers a mix of instrumentals and songs, aided and abetted by the likes of Alex Patterson, fellow Vagaband members Greg Cook and Jose McGill, fiddler Niles Krieger and mandolinist Evan Davies from The Often Herd and Emily Winngs on vocals.
It opens with the dobro and fiddle led -instrumental 'Spraying Mud', staring slow and gathering pace as the wheels speed up, leading to the equally brisk banjo-based 'On the Ropes' with a train churning rhythm, a slow bridge towards the end having voices intoning the title.
'Sailed Away' is wholly harmony a capella, the opening line of "as we sailed away from the land we loved, we knew we could never return/For the powers that be had let it be known our voices would never be heard" giving it a political refugee context, though the subsequent "we didn't ask for this but did nothing to stop it happening" and "though we tried to forget, the things in their name we served' come as a critique of non-resistance.
'New Express' takes on a CSN&Y mingled with Dire Straits feel and continues the theme of inaction ("What flavour lies have you been wrapped in?/They'll take then they'll hide then they'll disappear/Make us feel like we don't belong here/But it's what we do/When the curtains are drawn back/we can stay if we choose to wake up/Do you know how your fears, are being used against you?"), ending on the ominous line "Was that a sigh or your last breath?".
Opening softly and building, its circling melody constructed around drums and slide guitar 'Please Stop Lying' returns to instrumental mode, albeit with wordless background vocal flourishes, the political commentary turning to environmental concerns with 'Once Been'
("Was the air once clean/That empty building was trees") and once more complicity through inaction and a refusal to see what is in front of us ("A present we've been dreaming of/Our whole lives/Inability to tell the truth/Our generation stands accused/Of letting things get out of hand"), asking the question "Will we survive?/If we don't change".
A ruminative dobro instrumental, 'December' has a suitably wintry air to it, gradually swelling into a celebratory finale before ending with a two further songs. Featuring Hawaiian shaded lap slide guitar and Winngs on complementary flavoured vocals and spoken native tongue passage, the surf and sand swaying 'Raratonga' is a homage to his place of birth in the South Pacific but also carries an eco message in "The ocean provides, just what we need it too/Enough here for me and you, we can live off the land".
Starting and closing with restrained circling fingerpicked guitar, it ends with the lengthy 'On The Clock', the echoey vocals carrying lyrics which, "When does life begin?/Some say 35" possibly a self-reference, conclude the thematic throughline of the need to not stand idly by in a world where it seems there no driver behind the wheel and we're running out of time on "one big line of life, to death. "There's more to life than on a screen" he declares, where "fictional characters can be seen in the way you shape your dreams in the way you treat yourself and those around", and by not passively submitting "We can control our minds" and do "something with this gift of life", the anger that's been contained earlier erupting musically midway in a full on stadium rock outburst of raging, wailing electric guitar and pounding drums before ebbing away to a fade, surely opening up hitherto unlikely sideman opportunities in the hard rock arena.
Mike Davies
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Spraying Mud
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