Wisdom Twins 2013
Sounds Of Day And Night
Folk rock around the clock: toned down and shimmering.
It’s a quintessentially English thing for the press to be obsessed with American cabin-dwellers, while Old Blighty produces artists like Chris Wade who, in 2013 alone, delivered no less than three albums, this being the third in DODSON AND FOGG’s overall discography. The follow-up to the multicolored "Derring Do" doesn’t scream with bright light, though; neither it has a host of prog heroes on it. There’s only a guest trumpet to add a glorious hue on the organ-driven “Hear It In The Morning Still” to the main man’s vast instrumental palette that creates a concept picture as outlined by the two-part title track opening and closing the cycle, first with a reggae shift under a harmony guitar lick and a barrelhouse piano tick, and second with a flute-woven serenity.
Never staying in the same place, the drift runs from a West Coast hum to a West Yorkshire strum in the short course of “It’s All Right” with inroads to electric folk on “Life Is All Around Me” or “Feel It In The Air Around Yourself” and the gloom rock of “Night Train” with its heavy, if submerged, riffs and psychedelic undercurrent. Elsewhere, the delicately flowing lines in “Free In The Night” conjure a Renaissance reverie, in turn court-bound and rustic, before cosmic sounds make their way into such a spellbinding swirl, and “Morning Love” offers an exquisite acoustic lace to contrast its deliberately pale vocals. “Clocking Off” may add a sweet warp to it all, yet that’s how one feels when everything is said and done – in the album’s scope in this case, for Chris Wade’s got much more in his store. Amazing grace here.
***1/2
