Released March 30 – Fat Cat records 

The Length of the Rail is the second album under the pseudonym of The Balky Mule from Sam Jones; the first having been released eight years previously. Fittingly, the songs on this album almost feel as if they have been sealed in a kind of stasis; buried underground and unearthed only recently to give us a glimpse of a time when music was less finessed and buffed-up then what we enjoy now. Although many songs are suffused with the fizz, splash and pop of ambient electronic effects, the overall feel of the album is one of bucolic folksiness – opener ‘Dust Bird Baths’ even greets the listener with bird song.


The laidback air extends to the composition of the songs themselves, with efforts such as ‘Jisabroke’ and ‘A Moth’ feeling like little more than ramshackle sketches, collapsing backing into the pastoral mulch from which they sprang.  Similarly, the title track shifts from twee electronic plinking to widescreen acoustic balladry before abruptly stumbling to a halt just past the two minute mark. At times it feels almost as if Jones has a pathological aversion to clarity in his music, leading him to willfully sabotage any tendency towards ambition his muse may throw up. 


The more sprightly songs, such as the sun-dappled and appropriately-named ‘Wireless’, recall the folksiest moments on Beck’s Odelay and Mutations crossed with the glitch and stutter of Thom Yorke’s The Eraser. Meanwhile, the album’s more dense and forbidding moments, including the detuned guitar and scudding beats of ‘Blinking’ and the lurch and squelch of ‘Illuminated Numbers’ bring to mind the willful insularity of Graham Coxon’s early solo work or the unraveling sanity glimpsed in Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs .  


These latter tunes, shot through with  a sense of dread and suppressed menace, are the among album’s most intriguing and hint at the more interesting work Jones could have made if he’d steered away from the lightweight tweeness of songs like ‘Range’ with it’s none-more-hippy references to  Crosby Stills and Nash and lap sang sou chong. It’s a shame such folksy clichés weren’t reigned-in in preference of more moments like ‘Paper Crane’. Beginning as a woozy, spectral lullaby reminiscent of Arthur Russell’s cello and voice experiments on World of Echo, it bursts into full bloom with a jazzy, joyful bassline. It’s one of the album’s few fully realised songs and its highpoint. More songs like this would have done much to improve a likeable but ultimately frustrating work which too often feels stifled by its maker’s desire to impose lo-fi sketchiness on songs which would have benefitted from a more expansive and experimental approach.    

 www.myspace.com/thebalkymule

Posted In Album Reviews, Mar 29 2009. Words - Richard