Emotional rescue
More triumphant songs of defeat and desperation from Wirral wonder.
By Jim Wirth.
Bill Ryder-Jones
★★★★
Iechyd Da
DOMINO. CD/DL/LP
“I’M THE SAME as I’ve ever been,” Bill Ryder-Jones croaks ruefully on his Groundhog Day address, It’s Today Again. With the producer and former Coral guitarist’s fifth studio album, that’s once more a blessing and a curse.
The finest piano-in-the-sandpit songwriter of his generation, Ryder-Jones’s deft blend of heart-rending and transcendent has earned him usual suspects comparisons to Nick Drake and Elliott Smith in the course of a triumphant run of LPs: 2013’s baroque monster A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart, 2015’s grungy West Kirby County Primary, 2018’s Yawn. However, as with Cat Power or Ryder-Jones’s boyhood hero, Euros Childs, the intense beauty rarely comes without a troubling undertow.