Chris Wood - Handmade Life (2010)

To illustrate the lyrical and incisive dissection of public ills and private graces that is Handmade Life, the album‘s artwork sees the award-winning guitarist and songwriter Chris Wood getting his hands around his allotment. He’s digging deep and close to home. The music inside is less a disparate collection of songs than a cohesive work – a folk concept album.

Wood concocts a unique ensemble sound around Andy Gangadeen on drums, cellist Barney Morse Brown and trombonist Robert Jarvis. He‘s called it "church music with drums," and it’s couched in autumnal, introspective textures, as if these songs had just emerged from purposeful hibernation, written from a personal place, withdrawn from a chaotic world.

From the opener, ‘No Honey Tongued Sonnet’, his intent is clear: ‘All the king’s horses and all the king‘s men/I’m sorry but they haven‘t a clue//How to put the pieces together again/It’s just going to have to be you.‘ Not that’s it's an overly polemical album; there are beautiful love songs with political shading, alongside topical songs imbued with a sense of personal and collective history.

With ‘Hollow Point’, a ballad concerning the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, and the epic calling-to-account of the closing ‘Grand Correction, Wood delivers masterpieces that tackle the great public outrages of our times – finance, politics and terror. But there’s still room for a beautiful little song about asparagus that makes you want to lean down and pick it.