King Creosote, Astronaut Meets Appleman, review: 'a brilliantly concise, pointedly potent collection'

Download this: You Just Want; Faux Call; Love Life; Rules Of Engagement

Once a prodigious releaser of albums on CDR, vinyl and CD – some 50-odd at the last count – Kenny “King Creosote” Anderson has reined in his output since the acclaimed Diamond Mine and From Scotland With Love.

And it may be to his advantage: Astronaut Meets Appleman is a brilliantly concise, pointedly potent collection of songs whose apparent themes – the usual KC keenly-observed accounts of inter-personal relations and ramifications – hang suspended between the poles of digital and analogue, man and machine, heaven and earth, nature and technology, suggested by the curious title. That he manages to achieve this with such audacious musicality, masked by an understated charm and wit, makes it a singular, sui-generis delight.

Throughout, he creates an absorbing sound-bed from folk-rock grooves embellished with unexpected tones and textures: the sullen guitar thrumming of “You Just Want” is strengthened by rhythmic breathing, while eerily keening violins dance around the beat like dreamy dervishes; epiphanic bagpipes cement the cyclical guitar and organ of chugging recluse-rocker “Surface”, and cascading sparkles of harp illuminate the wan cello of “Faux Call” (a typical KC phonetic gag), a lilting waltz-time apologia crooned in his quavering tenor. “It’s the silence that somehow says it all, that I’m missing,” he laments, a man made more acutely aware of absence by the absence even of silence.

Elsewhere, the bumbling troubles, unspecified transgressions and mis-directed emotions that comprise these songs are usually handled with Anderson’s characteristic drollerie and “who, me?” disingenuity.

The emotional turbulence traversed in “Love Life” takes him from erotic fever (“All of my chemicals cry out with desire”) to barfly protestations of innocence (“Her jealous accusations know no bounds/Scarlett Johansson was never in my house”) with no drop in genial enthusiasm. The quirky spaceship romance of “Betelgeuse” ultimately results in disappointment so disarming that “my bipolar crash squeezed the arctic air out of my lungs”.

It’s not perfect, of course. I doubt if I’ll play “Peter Rabbit Tea” - his baby daughter chanting the title over a growing arrangement of strings and harp, in the manner of Gavin Bryar’s “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” - very often, for instance. But as the concluding “Rules Of Engagement” drifts away on a misty bed of ambient noise, one’s left with a lingering, whiskery warmth increasingly rare in modern music.