Posted: Wednesday 5th March 2008

Reviewed by Pritesh Peshavaria

As infants we prevail like empty vessels eager to be filled with knowledge, colour and experience, burying our heads in books and life and dreams. Such pursuits certainly go some way toward defining our consummate characters alas for many these fine, distinguished features are all but eroded with age, responsibility and despair.

Not so for a young Lyndon Morgans who, growing up in the conservative mining town of Blackwood, homeland of the Manic Street Preachers, was sustained and spared from dereliction by his appetite for fifties beat poetry and his idolatry of poets, prophets and protagonists such as Leonard Cohen, James Joyce, Joni Mitchell, Samuel Beckett, Tom Waits, Marcel Proust, Bob Dylan, Emile Cioran and perhaps most revered of all, the folk-noir savant Jacques Brel with whom he shares not only an emphatic, literate, openly emotive, visceral engagement in often gritty worldly experiences but a tremulous, other-worldly vocal delivery, fraught and fragile, beleaguered and baleful, impassioned and longing.

Morgans ventured to a Punk stricken London in the seventies, following the trend en suite aboard various meretricious bands, Jellymould being one of them. By 1992 he had adopted the stance of playwright, winning the Verity Bargate award and moderate, though somewhat vapid success for Water Music.

It wasn’t till the year 2000 that he stepped forward to guitar and vocal duties for the inception of Songdog. Joining him on electric guitars, mandolin, banjo and harmonica were school friend and Central St. Martins art student Karl Woodward, with Dundee born music student and jazz connoisseur Dave Paterson on drums, keyboards and percussion.

By 2001 Songdog had self released debut album The Way Of The World, followed by 2003’s Haiku on Evangeline Records, The Time of Summer Lightening in 2006 on One Little Indian, numerous festival appearances including support slots for Joan As Policewoman, Ed Harcourt, The Handsome Family, The Go-Betweens and now, the release of their fourth studio offering, A Wretched Sinners Song.

The album comes in two acts, Love Lust and Love Lost. Once again the onus is on the vivid literary fortitude of Morgans poetry drawn from his own personal journey through life, filled with a romantic lyricism and the insightful, compassionate portraits of the so called dregs of society; the alcoholics, drifters, drug addicts and prostitutes which reveal darkness and a bitter irony all set to a stark, acoustic instrumentality used simply as a vehicle to convey a rhapsodic, sympathetic feel to the songs. Piano and strings draw you trembling into the inconsolable, desolate depths of Ruben's Tattoo whilst faint drum beats pad solemnly across the tracks of indigo stained tears reciting the tale of a jealous mermaid and her ill-fated lover.

Guitars and mandolin blush tenderly as the devil seduces another victim in Owls whilst the horned one is sold someone’s soul-mate in the accordion led shanty of The Devil Needs You For His Squeeze.

The lost, aimless, frustrations of a stagnant existence are mulled over in that oasis of escape in a bleak town called Loser Heaven, and in the drunken ballad of Just Another Night In Limbo when you’d settle for any vestige of happiness in a life devoid of joy, and again in the blithe country-folk sound of Pilgrim Hill ‘and there’s no way back to any safe place, and I’m twirling in deep space alone’.

Long barren love affairs go through the motions as moonlit harmonicas rise like veils and mists and shadows on I Bought A Rose From The Guy At The Traffic Lights, and remain entombed despite a romantic trip to Paris in Montparnasse, going so far as leaving you to be a groupie in the gay, mellow-midnight shanty of Crown Of Thorns.

The Likes Of You And Me musters double bass and mandolins with eerie percussive saw-scapes in a tale about the perfect couple that just weren’t meant to be, whilst the mandolins and cello sway galleon like with a flamenco-folk flourish in A Prayer To Old Idols search for a lost childhood sweet-heart. A lament recounted again in the breathy Dylan-esque musings of Barbarella ‘Now I don’t mean to pretend we meant that much in the end, but when the stars shine down on me I’m glad they’re shining down on you too’.

There’s a conceptually magnificent, rhythmic folksome guitar cycle with a pearly lustre in On Portcrawl Sands where a vagabond heart reflects upon an unrequited childhood love who grew apart and away ‘Dawn fluttered like a bird from a magicians hat, I fell asleep on Portcrawl Sands, slipped through a rabbit hole of time…kids kick a football in the rain, a bin bag blows across a field, we’re kids again walking home from school, there’s Dexter, Joanne and me and you…’.

It must be said that the intense vocal cadences approbate a greater significance to the most frivolous of engagements like buying a chocolate cake or wearing your hair in a bee-hive, again highlighting the immense, aureate grandiloquence of Morgan’s delightful prose.

These are tearstained songs, written somewhere inbetween breathing out and breathing in, sung into empty fires, alone but for the bourbon and regret. Alone like ultimately we all are but beautiful and precious none the less.