Thursday, 14 April 2011

Matt Berry - Take My Hand

Matt Berry is a bit of an enigma, a successful comedic actor whose distinctive voice graces a hundred radio adverts, who regularly appears on our television screens and who recently happened to release a critically acclaimed debut album.

Recorded almost entirely in his front room, ‘Witchazel’ is a collection of thirteen songs that hark back to the British psychedelic or 70’s folk eras, when beards were compulsory, school children smoked banana skins and teenagers stayed up late to watch ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’.

Inspired partly by Richard Adam’s ‘Watership Down’, the sound of the countryside is apparent in much of the album, conjuring images of phallic maypoles, mystic rodents and drunken Morris men. However a definite psychedelic stream flows throughout. One such trippy tune is the current single, taken from the LP, the Nazz-tastic ‘Take My Hand,’ an uplifting heartfelt song, with warm analogue production, that sounds like it has always been a classic.

The flip side is a typically olde-worlde-folk-lore masterpiece called ‘Gather Up’, definitely one for the nu-foke-punk-pagans.




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