Neil Halstead

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NEIL HALSTEAD
Over the past 23 years, Neil Halstead has earned an ardent following by making intensely atmospheric music with a near-hypnotic power. Hailed by AllMusic as “one of Britain’s most respected songwriters,” the singer/guitarist served as frontman and primary songwriter for Slowdive (the legendary shoegaze outfit whose seminal studio albums include 1993’s Souvlaki, co-produced by Brian Eno). After its 1995 breakup, Slowdive morphed into the Halstead-helmed Mojave 3 and released a string of highly celebrated records that merged jangly alt-country with dusky dream-pop. In 2006 Mojave 3 went on indefinite hiatus, prompting Halstead to embark on an acoustic-driven solo career marked by British-folk-inspired melody and ethereal nylon-string strumming.

The follow-up to his acclaimed sophomore solo effort Oh! Mighty Engine, Palindrome Hunches finds the Cornwall, England-based Halstead continuing to craft moody and endlessly mesmerizing folk-infused songs. This time around, Halstead teamed up with producer Nick Holton and members of Wallingford’s Band of Hope (including Ben Smith on violin, Drew Milloy on double bass, Paul Whitty on piano, and Tom Crook on guitar) to achieve a sound that’s both remarkably rich and piercingly intimate. Rounded out by Holton and Aimee Craddok on backup vocals (as well as banjo player Kevin Wells on two tracks), Palindrome Hunches bears an uncommon warmth that Halstead partly attributes to its recording’s setting and strategy.

“At first we were going to record in a studio but everything seemed too clean—there’s something about proper facilities that’s a wee bit sterile,” says Halstead. Instead, he and his fellow musicians spent a weekend holed up in the music room at the Fir Tree primary School (a Wallingford school attended by Holton’s children). “We just went through the songs and recorded them live without very much rehearsal,” says Halstead. “We wanted to be spontaneous and simple and to keep the little mistakes that sneaked in.” Noting the playfulness of recording in such an unconventional space (“a proper music room with lots of little drums and glockenspiels and triangles everywhere”), Halstead points out that “the hardest thing really was to resist putting on a glockenspiel on every track.”

But while Palindrome Hunches certainly has its moments of whimsy, many of the songs are steeped in a mood that’s sometimes strikingly dark. The quietly epic “Wittgenstein’s Arm,” for instance, tells the true story of Paul Wittgenstein (an Austrian pianist who had his right arm amputated in World War I and lost three of his brothers to suicide). Backed by a sorrowful violin, Halstead’s luminous voice delivers heartaching lyrics like “Death runs deep in this family/Write a song for the left hand only/I lost my arm in the first great war/Wish I never learned that piano before.” Another standout track, “Tied To You” creates a sweeping and cinematic sense of impending tragedy with its tremulous piano and urgent guitar. And on songs like “Spin the Bottle” and “Sandy,” Halstead twists tender, near-tearful harmonies into rueful ballads of love lost.

No matter how melancholy the material on Palindrome Hunches, though, Halstead imbues each song with the same otherworldliness that’s made his records so spellbinding since the days of Slowdive. Throughout the album, he adorns the stark instrumentation with hushed yet powerful vocals and poetic yet lucid lyrics. With its sunny piano and tambourine beats, “Bad Drugs and Minor Chords” spins a wistful fairytale with Halstead warning his would-be love that “I’m not your rollercoaster, girl/I’m just a boy and I got no style.” On the title track, he serenades a “Kansas City girl in your Kansas City world” with a jumble of daffy palindromes (“Do geese see god?/I don’t suppose they do”) as gently tapped piano notes climb
www.neilhalstead.com/

MATTHEW P
Suffoulk-based Matthew P released his debut album Long Straight Lines in summer 2012 and you;ve probably heard some of his acoustic folk-pop gems already.

'End of the World' gained cult success through Ch4's use of it on ‘The Watchmen’ advert while 'The Girl on the Platform Smiled / She Began to Dance' was featured on the Match.com advert.
http://www.matthewpmusic.com/