HARRIS NEWMAN - Decorated

Fourth solo album from Canadian Harris Newman, a guitarist of remarkable technical skill often placed within the historical continuum of artists like Leo Kottke and John Fahey, but also endowed with evolutionary abilities that, drawing on Robbie Basho's more dreamlike techniques and infusing them with a post-psychedelic sensibility, place him alongside Jack Rose among the most important acoustic guitar composers of the last decade.

Listening to "Decorated" leaves nothing but enchantment: there's no room for points of view. Hypnotic, dark, dreamlike, it envelops like fog, unveiling unique sonic refinements, a technique that forgoes overdubs, and where the guitar isn't the sole master it delivers gems of incomparable beauty, like "Blues For Wilhelm", which recalls the Triple Burner project, or "Decorated", which opens with tenderness before erupting into a furious sonic progression, almost orgasmic in its release.

Where Newman relaxes – "The Malarian Two-Step", "Golden Valley As…" – the pauses and melodic openings stand out pure and crystalline, also evoking his fellow countryman Bruce Cockburn.

More complex, yet still evocative, are "We Return To Black Wolf Mountain" and "Anamnesis", with fingerpicking rich in ingenious harmonic solutions.

While the album opens sunnily with the evocative "Our Cavalcade Of Sightless Riders", the ending grows tense and pulsing, first offering us the only electric flash – "Opera House Stomp", with its overflowing, energetic texture, a small masterpiece that makes Newman's attained maturity even more evident – then the apocalyptic finale of "A Quarter To Call The Ambulance", which seems to take your breath away. So many emotions invite a closer, repeated listen to a work of real depth.

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31/10/2007