Tom Rodwell

Novelists famously use their day jobs for material—guitarist Tom Rodwell mines his crossover blues career with a writerly taste for the surreal on Wood & Waste, a decadent and charmingly outré collection on Fireplace Recordings. Wood & Waste is what used to be called a cult record - a set of warmly anarchic influences and timeworn qualities that is Tom Rodwell’s trademark. His songs resemble ragged short stories, cobbled-together genres from an alternate history. “The aim is to locate each song in a very specific room of its own, with contrasting feels like layers of paint or old wallpaper.” The album’s centrepiece is “She Got Me Boiling”, a juggernaut of psychedelic calypso welded to mindless riffs on cannibalism that would make the Mighty Sparrow blush. Driven by a bass-heavy guitar pulse and animated carnival drums, it’s a fiendishly irresistible piece of music, as is the absurdist one-chord freak-out “Touch Me Like a Teddybear”, featuring NZ free improv notorieties Jeff Henderson and Chris O’Connor on drums. Improvisation is a key theme of Wood & Waste, where frequently a skeletal idea transforms into a fleshy dance rhythm. “Keep on Knockin’” subverts a determined Bo Diddley beat with dissonant Mellotron in praise of Edward Hopper and William Morris. “Plenty Time” is a species of prog rhumba set in Roman Britain, indebted to Nigerian giant King Sunny Ade. As a physical release, Wood & Waste is an AAA all-analogue chain.