Hans Theessink - Hard Road Blues - VINYL LP

Recorded in a non-studio environment - fantastic ambient sound! Theessink has composed a stirring set of songs that seamlessly fuse his unplugged picking, sonorous voice, and three-piece band into the very definition of laid-back comfort. Three singers from Zimbabwe add wonderful harmonies that fill-out the music to magical effect. Such magnificent combinations of seemingly divergent elements drive this splendid album to spine-tingling heights. Theessink doesn't play traditional blues here; instead, he deftly references the genre as one of many stops on his global trek through the Delta, into backwoods folk, and onward to Africa. Album Tracks 1. Slow Train 2. Katrina 3. God Created the World 4. Thula Mama/Oh Mother Don't You Weep 5. Love You Baby 6. Old Man Trouble 7. Leaving at Daybreak 8. May the Road 9. Run on for a Long Time 10. When Luther Played the Blues

It took seven years for Sandro Perri to return with an album under his own name, releasing In Another Life (Inchhis outsider pop masterpieceInch- Exclaim) in the fall of 2018, as the much-anticipated follow-up to his acclaimed full-length Impossible Spaces (#38 album of 2011 at Pitchfork, among other accolades). But the Perri floodgates have now well and truly opened the flow of sparkling, eddying music he's been meticulously doling out of late (including two recent volumes of collaborative avant-electronic work with his Off World project) charts another vital, rejuvenating tributary with Soft Landing. Soft Landing features songs Perri has been playing around with for the better part of the last decade, taking many forms along the way, and recorded sporadically over a long period. It's also his most guitar-based collection since 2007's Tiny Mirrors. While Perri is rightly celebrated as Inchone of the most singular producers in contemporary musicInch (Boomkat) for his widely varied electronic work, his foundations as a guitarist have always anchored his 'solo' albums in one form or another. On Soft Landing, Perri's guitar playing is at the smoothly, expressively rambling heart of these tunes - while his recording and mixing acumen as a (self) producer is also on brilliant display. As with last year's In Another Life (which comprised two album-length sides of 'infinite song'), Soft Landing opens with the 16-minute InchTime (You Got Me)Inch, an enchanted mid- tempo excursion anchored by Perri's gently sliding guitar riff and a serene vocal delivering lyrics that can be read as a wistfully acquiescent love letter to the fourth dimension. Paced by congas, shakers, claves, impressionistic piano and even the occasional wind chime, Perri wraps up his final vocal refrain by the song's fifth minute and then steers the instrumental theme down a long and winding road in his inim

A low-key but emotionally moving collection of stripped down songs, performed by Hans Theessink, who plays and sings with singular grace, using his honeyed baritone and his soulful pickin' to reinterpret songs by people as diverse as Hank Williams, Tom Waits, Bo Diddley, Johnny Cash, and the Rolling Stones, recasting all of their familiar tunes and a few of his own in service to a movie based on the Austrian version of Everyman, the English morality play. Album Tracks 1. Way Down in the Hole 2. The Man Comes Around 3. No Expectations 4. I'm a Man 5. Mother's Advice 6. Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down 7. The Beast in Me 8. You Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond 9. The Angel of Death 10. Oh Sinner Man 11. Call Me 12. Sympathy for the Devil