Paul Tasker - Cold Weather Music

  by John Clarkson

published: 15 / 5 / 2016

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Review

The Glasgow-based musician Paul Tasker is best known for his work as the guitarist and songwriter in the acclaimed folk duo Doghouse Roses. He has also played guitar and mandolin on Nick Garrie’s ’49 Arlington Gardens’ and slide guitar on the Willard Grant Conspiracy’s ‘Pilgrim Road’. The entirely instrumental ‘Cold Weather Music’, which has been released on his own label Yellowroom Records, is his debut album under his own name, and is a nine-track soundtrack to a set of both real and imagined events. While there is a CD version, a limited edition LP edition is of particular note, appearing on heavyweight vinyl, and coming accompanied with a sixteen –page photo booklet that with beautiful black-and-white still life shots of Scottish islands, whiskey bars, Highland roads, Celtic graveyard crosses and American forest plains reveals some of Tasker’s inspirations for these tracks. ‘Cold Weather Music’ is performed primarily on acoustic guitar, but on two tracks Tasker makes a Clawhammer five-string banjo his main instrument. ‘Husker’s Theme’, the seven-minute opening number and the theme for a fictional character emigrating with his adopted daughter to America from Scotland at the beginning of the twentieth century, is the first tune to use the banjo and combines it with shimmers of pedal steel from Thomas Marsden to kick the album off to an evocative start. ‘Tundra Plane’, the other banjo piece, is an initially wispy-sounding piece that builds up with occasional flutters of instrumentation to an insistent force. Amongst the acoustic guitar pieces, ‘Sky Train’ merges Tasker’s gently plucked, rising-and falling chords with Jo Shaw’s wandering flute to gorgeous effect. ‘Blooms in the Autumn’ pits Tasker’s guitar up against that of Slovenian musician Dejan Lapanja, who also mixed and mastered ‘Cold Weather Music’, to create a piece of gentle, reflective melancholy, while ‘Ne’er day’, which again makes use of Nash’s rambling flute, captures all the tentative hope and uncertainty of the first day of the year. Tasker made the right decision in stretching ‘Cold Weather Music’ from an EP as it was originally planned into an album as it is constantly riveting and engaging. Emotive and packing a quiet wallop, ‘Cold Weather Music’ is a record of great depth, dense with ideas and, an album of both scope and imagination, instrumental music at its finest.

Track Listing:-

1 Husker's Theme
2 Gorlitzer
3 Sky Train
4 Valve Oil
5 Blooms in the Autumn
6 Tundra Plane
7 Ne'er Day
8 Ine
9 Rising

Band Links:-

http://paultaskermusic.com/
https://www.facebook.com/paultaskermus
https://twitter.com/pntasker
https://www.youtube.com/user/thedoghou
http://www.songkick.com/artists/140717
http://www.last.fm/music/Doghouse+Rose

Label Links:-

http://www.doghouseroses.org/
https://www.facebook.com/doghouseroses
https://twitter.com/doghouseroses
https://www.facebook.com/pntasker
https://twitter.com/pntasker