Songs for broken toys and broken lovers. Why keep beating yourself up about things when there’s plenty of people more adequately qualified to pummel, eh? Like a river curling around the peaks and troughs of a peculiar valley there’s more than a trickle of sweet melancholy running through ‘Learning About Loathing’ and though not bitter exactly, it does erupt from a spring of sulky regret and loss. Sung with the fragile resignation of a young Robert Wyatt and rumbling with the fretful (yet lyrical) mannerisms of James Taylor, Rupert G. is the youngest of Devon’s fledgling Drift Collective – a loose affiliation of folk strays, wayfarers and orphans and responsible for the wave-tossingly fine album, ‘The Homesick Children Of Migrant Mothers’ from fellow West Country beautists, Thirty Pounds Of Bone. Left homeless, destitute and wasted, Mr Morrison sought refuge in the comfort of his guitar and set about writing ‘Learning About Loathing’ as ‘an ode to all things corruptible’. With the assistance of multi-instrumentalist and Drift captain, Johny Lamb sitting in on backing vocals, assorted drums, piano and ‘clipper’ lighter, Morrison holed himself in a remote country church and came up with a collection that sits somewhere between the star twinkling loveliness of Elliott Smith and the medically impaired freakery of Daniel Johnston; a medicine box of tinkling piano keys, church bells, cellos, irish drums, violins, violas and strange, extraneous sound effects applied to a nylon/classical base. And whilst there’s a clear grotesque beauty to tracks like ‘Learning About Loathing’ and ‘Funeral For A Foe’, there’s no small degree of kindness and joy in the daisy springing ‘Summer Bride’ and ‘In Out’.
A bold, confident debut with a bruised, tender flipside. A beauty.