Son Of Town Hall - The Adventures of Son Of Town Hall (Album Review)

We’ve been rather taken with transatlantic duo Son Of Town Hall since catching them at Cecil Sharp House last year (review).  The pair are made up of London-based singer-songwriter Ben Parker (in a past life, one half of Ben & Jason) and Santa Fe-based singer-songwriter and author David Berkeley.  Here they are, eighteen months later touring the UK once more, this time in support of their long-awaited debut LP.  Their live show can’t really be translated to record (you just have to go) but the album does its best to bring the uninitiated up to speed, with the aid of its accompanying newspaper inserts in which their tale is wittily woven. 

Parker & Berkeley have carefully created a fictional backstory in which they are, in fact, raggedly-garbed gentlemen from a bygone era, permanently resident on the high seas, travelling from place to place on a raft (yes! a raft!) with only their guitars for company.  Oftentimes they shore up to play their songs, acting like bemused time travellers from a hundred and fifty years ago.  It’s a little bit Spinal Tap but with a heavily Beckettian existential edge and, like it or not, it neatly sets them apart from every other social media-crazed musician on the planet (which is, let’s face it, almost all of them) and lends plausibility - or should I say authenticity - to their gentle brand of unashamedly backward-looking acoustic folkiness.

The record opens, unsurprisingly, with the sounds of lapping waves and a harmonium melody that is gentle, naïve and more than a little melancholy.  This eases us into the frame of ‘St Christopher’, its delicate acoustic guitars underpinned with judiciously-placed piano and a string section that breaks the needle on the Weepometer ™.  Berkeley and Parker take turns on the verses and thus the scene is set: this is timeless music for the restless of spirit, the yearnsome of heart and the regretful for what has been. 

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‘The Line Between’ and ‘Poseidon’ are looser and sound deliberately more boxy, transporting you directly to the back room of whatever coastal tavern your mind can conjure and evoking Simon & Garfunkel played at the wrong speed and in the wrong century.  With its plaintive horn line, ‘To Breathe Is To Burn’ is more carefully held and precise with Berkeley and Parker’s respectively American and English voices marrying exquisitely on a song that sounds like something Mark Knopfler wrote for the Everly Brothers before he was even born.

The record’s bouncy lead single ‘California’ is more singalong and features the inimitable, sizzling fiddle of Sara Watkins (she of Nickel Creek) before the fragility of the record’s centrepiece ‘Cobbler’s Hill’ takes its hold on you.  With a full minute of a capella before the millimetre-perfect guitars even dare to enter, the song is a rare chunk of fragile perfection.  It’s a perfection that the rest of the record struggles to match, though there are similarly sublime flashes in the stirring strings of ‘Morning Fields’; the soft-blown brass of ‘Holes In A Western Town’ and in the indescribably fabulous instrumental closer, ‘Ship’s Piano’.

If there is a flaw in this album, it is only that its songs aren’t permitted to be more sonically diverse, owing to the restrictions of the self-constructed genre.  This leads the record as a whole to feel perhaps a little one-gear but, in our modern world of relentless electronic noise, it could rather be seen as a gear we ought to shift into - or to seek refuge in - more often.  In any case, following The Adventures of The Son Of Town Hall is a rewarding experience; it is a debut blessed with beauty and depth, power and grace - much like the ocean whence it has come.

Review by Rich Barnard.