For all the lush and reckless romanticism of his rich yet faintly stiff velvet baritone, there’s a noble misanthropy providing a much more granite-like seam on Anthony Reynold’s generously foppish debut album, ‘British Ballads’. Reclining on a sofa of idle sophistication and engaging in all manner of whimsy, the Cardiff-born Reynolds surveys his kingdom with a combination of wide-eyed wonder and awkward dislocation. He is of his world, but not in it, straddling a divide that threatens to fracture still further on the one hand, and cheerfully stroking the cracks on the other. In spirit, it’s not unlike Janis Ian’s signature tune, ‘At Seventeen’, Reynolds extending the bittersweet commentary on teenage angst well into his early thirties with some gently fondled ivories, a flick of his cravat and a spoonful of bile. As Reynolds says of himself on the candid and analytical, ‘Those Kind Of Songs’, he wishes there was blood in his veins ‘except for vinegar and wine’, something in his life except for ‘memories and time’. It’ a song pursued with the same shameless Americana as anything released by Cherryghost and Richard Hawley, but kept in check by a plethora of domestic detail and a very British acerbic bent that tiptoes around predictable rhyme-schemes and the shame of conventional wisdom. Reynolds may be lacking in social graces, desperately remaining at home and inventing lovers on the phone but he is rewarded a degree of remoteness seldom grasped outside of monasteries and Scott Walker’s recording studio. It’s self-critical but in no way shameful.
As a rule the album rarely rises above the controlled stroking of brushes against drum leather, some lightly fingered piano riffs and the purr of orchestration; album standout ‘Country Girl’ in particular, extolling some noirish, Ennio Morricone-like guitar breaks, a louche bass and the most tearful of violins. Add to this 60’s ‘psych-folk’ diva Vashti Bunyan and some fretful whispers and you have something that combines the smoky, guttural existentialism of Keren Ann and Serge Gainsbourg, the heat of a Sergio Leone Western and something between the city and the stars; like Nick Cave without the bats and Lee Hazelwood without the boots. It’s a haunting, recursive melodrama that peaks with ‘The Disappointed’, a song which bears witness to the collapsing of dreams and the gentle rocking of Reynolds boat on the breakers of life’s misfortunes to the tolling of bells and the crumbling of sails; the lyrical equivalent of setting your hair only for it to collapse in the rain.
British Ballads features a quixotic cast of characters and some of Anthony’s favourite living musicians, including the Writer/Philosopher Colin Wilson (‘The Hill’), Vashti Bunyan (‘Country Girl’/’Just So You Know’), John ‘Kid in a Big world’ Howard, Dot Allison (‘I Know You Know’), Fiona Brice, Bryan Mills, Simon Raymonde (‘Just So You Know’), Ivor Talbot, Paul Cook, Anthony Transcargo, and Nic Brennan.
Doomed romance, loser-pop – call it what you will, but never underestimate the determination of a quiet man. Unless he is wearing sandals.