Monolith Cocktail Blog

PREMIERE
Words: Dominic Valvona

Junkboy  ‘Waiting Room’
(Fretsore Records)  5^th July 2019

As Rich Hanscomb, one half of this sibling duo of refined placeable folksy-psych and Beach Boys imbued dreamy 1960s pop, puts it Junkboy are “more a way of life as opposed to a career.” And yet life has a habit of derailing, if at best, delaying things. Highly anticipated, the Hanscomb brothers’ upcoming, and sixth, album Trains Trees Topophilia (released 2nd August) is their first since the well-received (especially by us) 2014 dreamy Sovereign Sky.

Thankfully then, once more beachcombing the East Sussex coastline and South Downs versant, Rich and his brother Mik are back making music together after an unofficial pause. And what a halcyon if gentle return to the fold it is too.

Inspired by the brothers move, years ago, from the Essex coastal town of Southend-On-Sea to the Brighton And Hove area in East Sussex, and the famous post WWI abstract pastoral artists that captured that idyllic topography (messrs Paul Nash, John Piper and Graham Sutherland), the new peaceable album is made up of empirical instrumental evocations imbued partly by a more idealized vision of gracious, contemplative scenery-dreaming rail travel: Not the less frustrating cancelled and late crammed Southern Rail commuter journey version many of us have made in torment, including me; where the thought of stealing away a minute to meditate and ruminate is spoiled when you’re forced to balance a laptop or notebook whilst you stand for your entire journey in heaving train carriages.

This idyllic vision could even be said to have a Zen like quality, as interrupted in the beautifully thematic greenery palette album artwork by Yumi Okuda.






Further artistic inspiration comes in the form of the duo’s photographer and pal Christopher Harrup’s decade-old self-published photo album Essex Topography, the landscape psychogeography of which is a personal one for the brothers as they transduce memory and feeling into both a psychedelic love letter and more mindful soft bulletin.

The boys are accompanied on this woozy evocative journey by Will Calderbank (Mumford & Sons) on cello, Becka Wright (Buffo’s Wake) on violin, Owen Gilham (Jeannie Barry) on banjo plucking duties, “frailing” e-bow and dappled Fender Rhodes and Dave Woodhead (Billy Bragg) on flugelhorn, whilst the prolific polymath Oliver Cherer (no stranger to this blog) has contributed the Paul Nash inspired ‘A Chance Encounter’. Adding to that rich woozy sound of psychedelic folk, baroque chamber and surf pop is a penchant for 90s Chicago post-rock and the green-and-pleasant poetic jazz of the late British pianist/composer Michael Garrick.






Taken from that album and premiered today on the Monolith Cocktail, the precursor ‘Waiting Room’ single is a swimmingly melodious, fanned vibrato pinged psychedelic delight that brings a piece of California’s Hawthorne and Laurel Canyon to the splendor of the commuter satellite towns of the British South Coast. Bathed in a certain glow both lilting yet tinged with rumination, the 12 and 6-string symmetry and rolling drums of this piece of Pet Sounds driftwood proves a bucolic introduction to what sounds like a promising album suite. Without further ado…. go and enjoy this thoughtfully etched part of the local South Coast topography.





Credits:

All the photography in this post was taken by Junkboy photographer Christopher Harrup.
Album artwork by Yumi Okuda.

Further Reading:

Sovereign Sky Review

Junkboy Special Playlist