Franz Nicolay
Album: To Us, The Beautiful!
Label: XtraMile
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.franznicolay.com

His fourth solo album since leaving The Hold Steady finds the Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter dispensing with his familiar accordion colours (and, to a large extend, banjo too) in favour of a decidedly guitar driven collection laded with circling melody lines, punchy riffs, big, pounding drums and massive hooks.

Recorded in just six days (rehearsals included) and with a band drawn from such punk rock outfits as Against Me!, Leftover Crack and Jawbone, Nicolay says his list of inspirations includes the Waterboys, John Cooper Clarke, the Egyptian Book of the Dead and Ivor Cutler though perhaps the most immediate - if unlikely - comparison in musical terms (racing verses, massive soaring choruses) would be Meatloaf, albeit with slightly less bombast in the production.

That's certainly the case in the opening flurry that begins with Nicolay bringing his musical and cultural heritage to bear on the two minute title track, a rousing anthemic celebration apparently derived from a Ukranian drinking toast, 'To us, the beautiful, and to those who disagree, may their eyes fall out'. The chugging rhythm of Marfa Lights sustains the chest-swelling mood before giving way to the no less dramatic, but more measured tempo of the call and response Talk To Him In Shallow Water with its rolling drum pattern and a plucked banjo line only to explode back into towering chords and ringing guitars with Bright White.

Borrowing the line 'you're my favourite waste of time from Marshall Crenshaw's 1982 B-side, Imperfect Rhyme is more rock n roll exigency (the riff is annoyingly - but elusively - familiar), as is Open With The Wrestlers (albeit crossbred with a flourish of show tune) while caught between them is Everything Is Going According To Plan where the echoey vocals are surrounded by crashing, discordant wall of sound guitar peals ringing like cathedral bells.

After all this ebullience, Bring Me A Mirror suddenly puts on the sonic brakes for a stripped down and cracked love song (with one of the album's more direct and lucid lyrics) with just Nicolay and an acoustic guitar, a brief moment of calm and reflection before things get plangent again on the choppy rhythms of Jerusalem Against Athens, the racing urgency of Your Body, And The Borderline and the surging six minute epic closer Porta Fenestella with its flaring, churning guitars, sonorous, stabbing drums and fade-out chorus refrain "I was too old for this when I was too young for this. I was too young to quit when I was too old for this."

I readily admit I haven't the faintest idea what some of the literary-inspired lyrics are about (apparently there's "a lot about circularity, about being trapped in a path and figuring out how to carve a new way of being"), but they somehow still instinctively resonate in the blood, especially when you turn the volume up and let the thunder crack.

Mike Davies