Joey Herzfeld and His So-Called Friends - Are Watching You

by John Clarkson

published: 5 / 2 / 2016

Joey Herzfeld and His So-Called Friends - Are Watching You

Label: Scratchy Records
Format: LP

intro

Excellent and unusual debut album from London-based band Joey Herzfeld and His So Called Friends whose instrumentation includes accordions, mandolins and ukeleles

It becomes instantly apparent that Joey Herzfeld and His So Called Friends are offering something different with this, their debut album. A bouncing accordion kick starts the first track, 'Great Again', and a deadpan Herzfeld, half speaking, half singing, provides its opening line: "I don't suppose you will read this letter/Because you don't know who I am." Other instruments - a mandolin, a banjo and ukeleles - drift and out of the mix, while Herzfeld's lyrics mutate into a story about a crazed fan who decides to bring down his favourite author to bring him up again ("Watch your back now/When things are rosy you're far too cosy to write"). Other songs similarly strike a balance between the macabre and the comical. 'Half-Hearted Maggie Dickson' tells the true story of an eighteenth century Scottish woman who was given a pardon after surviving a public hanging, and now ironically has a pub named after in Edinburgh's Grassmarket, yards from where her failed execution took place. 'Girl Won't You Dance?'is about a woman who turns down her only proposals of marriage, both from the same suitor twenty years apart, in the hope that something still better will come along, while the protagonist of 'Cracks' is a teenage recluse, who after a year confined in his room, ventures outside to find the apocalypse has taken place in his absence. For all their unorthodox junk shop instrumentation, which also includes a double bass, fiddle, clarinet and a baritone sax, Joey Herzfeld and His Friends are, however, far from being just a darkly humorous gimmick. Their music is never anything less than versatile. 'Tightrope', the first of three instrumentals, is especially effective, swinging being a twanging country and western number, a spidery experimental track and a rollicking gypsy waltz, while 'Cracks' concludes in a grandscale and epic duelling hoedown. This is a terrific album from an unusual and enterprising act.

Track Listing:-

1 Great Again
2 Tightrope
3 Elsewhere
4 Half-Hanged Maggie Dickson
5 Girl Won't You Dance?
6 Charge of the Centipedes
7 Life in the City
8 Secret Admirer
9 Ugliness
10 Seedy
11 Mayfly
12 Cracks
13 End of the Set