Review

The first thing that’ll strike you about this exquisitely packaged LP, a co-release on the Carbon and Feeding Tube imprints (a collaboration which has also seen releases by Terrascope favourites Eric Arn and Handful of Dust amongst others), is the striking cover art by Cam Löfstrand. It’s digitally created, but in the style of an etching and was designed to be screen-printed by hand. It serves as a perfect representation of the contents, an album of songs all loosely connected by the title, ‘Path to the Gallows’. What’s hidden at first glimpse however is the musical expertise of the artist himself, Duncan Park. Opening (once the hand-held cassette tape recorder is rolling) with the twelve-minute long progressive folk extravaganza ‘A Moon Possessed Corpse’, Duncan treats us to some dazzling semi-acoustic guitar playing in the style of Six Organs of Admittance accompanied by his dog Sage yowling in the background – shades of Iceberg’s ‘Crosby: Second Class Citizen Blues’ on which Crosby the dog (once one of three dogs resident at Deke Leonard’s pad: you can probably guess what the other two were named) took over the mic for an interlude between tracks. Instead of a doggie interlude however, after closing out ‘A Moon Possessed Corpse’ with some gorgeous fingerstyle guitar which reminded me in a good way of Josh Kimbrough’s ‘Sunbathing Water Snake’ (from the album ‘Slither, Soar and Disappear’), although others have invoked the names Bert Jansch, Robbie Basho and Daniel Bachman by way of comparison, and I can see that too; anyway after the twelve minutes are up Duncan chooses to document his own thoughts on tape on ‘Talking and Tuning’, setting the recording in a particular moment like a sepia photo while he tunes and warms up, preparing us for the torrent of banjo played in the American primitive style entitled ‘Flood Warning’. Then on the excellent ‘Leaving Beeston Blues’ (I should add here that although Duncan is based in South Africa, ‘Path To The Gallows’ was recorded partly in Beeston, UK and partly back in Durban) Duncan reverts to the gentler acoustic guitar style, this time with a backwash of keyboard sounds. Finally the Basho-esque ‘Weaver’s Nest’ dissolves into a minute or two of chirping insects, wind chimes, tape hiss and almost inevitably a farewell from both Duncan and Sage-dog. What a lovely way to end a really quite magical record, one which you’ll find plenty of reward in playing over and over.