Budgee: Swing the Barkley
Discolexique
One of the selling points for this compact set by Budgee, aka Celine Brooks, a Canadian singer-songwriter currently living in Glasgow, is the playing of Scottish musician Gareth Dickson on two of its seven songs. Dickson's justly recognized as an original and special artist, not only for his splendid solo albums but for having toured and performed with Vashti Bunyan for many years. Yet while his acoustic guitar definitely enhances the pieces on which he plays, Swing the Barkley is very much Brooks's baby.
At the core of the Budgee sound are two things, Brooks's unusual voice first, a bright, slightly nasally, and girlish instrument that grows in appeal with repeated exposure, and secondly acoustic guitar strumming. Without compromising on that minimal essence, arrangements are smartly fleshed out beyond that core to give the songs individuating character. Her observational material wrestles with a range of topics; whether it be time slip-slidin' away, relationship challenges, the state of society, or confusion, uncertainty, and self-doubt in general, she evidences a wry sensibility and penchant for allusive lyrics.
With Dickson adding ghostly textures to the song, a bluesy lilt and twang distinguishes the opening “Time Eraser,” after which “White Noise” advances at a similar mid-tempo clip, with this time Dickson bolstering the density of the song's guitar-focused arrangement and Brooks supplementing harmony vocals with call-and-response. Noticeably uplifting is “A Good Sign,” which augments its rapturous vocal delivery with slide guitar, while “On My Side,” a blues-folk exercise that builds on its incantatory feel with impassioned singing and what sounds like the wail of a harmonica, is particularly haunting. With a theremin-like warble spiking its choruses, “Mary Contrary” distances itself from the other songs with ‘50s-styled doo-wop background vocals and rhythms.
If there's a misstep, it occurs when phone recordings of Celine's mom Irene are woven into the arrangement of “Pure Dead Golden”; as sometimes happens, what works on paper proves less effective in practice, with the addition diluting the clarity of the presentation. The press release cites Robbie Basho, Fleetwood Mac, and Talking Heads as inspirations of sorts, but truth be told few traces of them are evident. One is more likely to come away from Swing the Barkley hearing it as a pure Budgee creation of folk-pop songcraft, regardless of who or what served as inspirations. At about twenty-six minutes, the release is more mini-album than full-length, but enough's included to give a clear impression of who and what Budgee's all about.November 2019