James Yorkston & The Athletes - 'Just Beyond The River' (Domino)
4/5
By: Kevin Molloy
Sit a seventies John Martyn down on the coast, and have him watch the sun rise over the distant horizon, and slowly separate the sky from the sea. Make sure you record exactly what his guitar melodiously sings, but not his voice. The voice has to be verging on the spoken, with a little something of Shane MacGowan's growl. Now folkify the proceedings, but not with the punk touch of The Pogues, but more the sounds of a late night session around an illegal Scottish home-distillery (without bag-pipes, we're talking about a rarer breed: sensitive Scots). It's all as good as it sounds.
It's in the lyrics that this sensitivity shows most. That most folkish of topics, the ocean and the coast, is revisited many-a-time throughout. At first the lyrics seem irrelevant, but soon an epic of the everyday begins to emerge; each song is a subtler rendering of the emotions in a lyric prior... each song builds upon the foundations of the last whilst subtly laying newer ones for the tracks to come. The LP charts a series of moments of joy and despair, often in the same song, each described from a different viewpoint, but each portraying the same cycle of love and loss with honest accuracy and sentiment.
There is, however, a monotony to 'Just Beyond The River'. The lyrics paint their pictures one small stroke at a time, on a huge canvas. The backdrop, meanwhile, is a lilting fiddle, accordion, banjo and acoustic guitar brew. The musicianship is quietly spectacular, but far too soon lulls all attention from your body to a far-off, warm and unattainable place. At times this is exactly what you want; the album is an anaesthetist to the world, an instant fix of cosy oblivion. But when you actually try to listen, the songs keep sliding away from you, silent hinges swing them back and we fall blissfully back to a surreal twilight, lyrics and melodies netting around the head, dragging all thought from a previously confused mind.
Hence there is a truth to Yorkston's own lyric, 'I sing like a baritone, of some nonsense or other.' Frustration abounds that we don't seem to be able to listen enough to understand what poignant nonsense is being voiced, but does it really matter? And whilst the LP suffers heavily from unrecognisable songs, each blending happily into the next, it almost seems intentional. The entirety is like diving into the deepest, calmest pool of your psyche, gently drifting whilst you're cleansed of those everyday cares and concerns.
'Just Beyond The River' is one of those rarest of treasures, an album spiritual in effect without a religious or spiritual bias. Indeed, the most religion we get simply acts as a self-criticism ('look beyond my need for clamour, my clumsy touch and Catholic roving eye'), and humanises Mr Yorkston more than he possibly imagined. Whether intentional or not, his meandering and personal creation is a balm for city-life, for lovers lost and for thoughts confused.
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