DAVID A JAYCOCK - Hold Star Return

David A Jaycock is one of those talents that resist fitting neatly into any rigid artistic framework: a skilled guitarist with a fluid fingerpicking touch, a songwriter with an alien, psychedelic sensibility in the vein of Robyn Hitchcock, and a brilliant interpreter of the folk tradition in his acclaimed partnership with Marry Waterson. The Cornwall-born musician has produced projects that are as aesthetically varied as they are unique.

“Hold Star Return” is yet another slap in the face to predictability and routine, aided by an unlikely accomplice in James Yorkston, a musician David A Jaycock crossed paths with during his days in the experimental folk ensemble Big Eyes Family Players, here present not only as a musician but also as the one responsible for releasing the album.

Drum machines and synths drive an almost dreamlike journey through 1980s electronica, poised between sci-fi landscapes, post-industrial distortions and electro-pop urges in the Sheffield style. It is the contrast with the rural, folk nature of David A. Jaycock's compositions that gives the project its magic.

Recorded over several sessions and across a fairly long span of time, the album is deliberately fragmented, stirred by dark presences that keep even its more danceable electronic impulses in check, as in the splendid “Coming Up In Paris”, a track that reworks the early Sheffield electronic scene and its surroundings through a psychedelic lens.

David A Jaycock navigates the electronic imagination with a profound awareness that is genuinely striking. Almost twilight folk landscapes become the subject of decadent, nearly post-industrial pages (“Bird Food”), while speculative layers of field recordings shed their unnecessary folk roots for a pulsing interlude in the manner of Kraftwerk (“General Custer Go Down There”).

“Hold Star Return” is a triumph of music as popular expression. Electronics become a tool for probing the deep psychic emotions that bind humanity to the earth. Tracks suspended between the dreamlike and the real, such as “The Northern Line To Polar” and “Torpoint Ferry”, are exemplary in this sense, sonic outpourings that call to mind both John Foxx and Vangelis.

David A Jaycock revisits the early electronic adventures with a fresh ear, drawn both to the powerful, dreamlike emotion of a keyboard fluttering through the air ("White Tea From The Vending Machine"), and to the chance to rewrite the physicality of rock'n'roll and pop with new rules ("Space Bar Hold Star Return"), without ignoring the enormous potential of electronic instruments, now part of popular culture and music.

With a background where tradition and modernity blend, the musician ventures beyond the boundaries of experimentation ("All Blood And Glass") until he takes hold of the darkest and most captivating soul of electronic music, staging with spoken voice, vintage synths and a frosty, old-fashioned romanticism a concentrate of avant-electronic-folk poetry ("I'll Take Two Of Those"), which highlights the elusive, naïve nature of one of the most surprising records of the year.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

08/09/2023