David A. Jaycock - Hold.Star.Return (2023)

A talented English multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, Manchester-based David A. Jaycock's compelling blend of pastoral, guitar-led English folk and shape-shifting experimental space rock invokes names like John Fahey, Incredible String Band, Bert Jansch, Six Organs of Admittance, and James Yorkston. An active member of the freak folk collective Big Eyes Family Players, Jaycock is also a prolific solo artist and collaborator, having released a string of well-received LPs beginning with 2007's largely improvised Killing of Uncle Faustus and Other Mythologies. Other releases include 2010's limited-edition vinyl-only Presets, 2011's synth-fueled country-folk outing Coleopterous Cuckoos Collude, and 2015's Two Wolves, the latter of which saw the mercurial guitarist working alongside U.K. folk hero Marry Waterson.

In a strange and imaginary English underworld, a land of haunted hedgerows, technological nostalgia and abandoned housing estate playgrounds, David A. Jaycock is a national treasure. His solo work has seen him range gleefully between vintage synths, oneiric folktronica, acoustic psychedelia and Robyn Hitchcock-esque songwriting, while his work as a duo with Marry Waterson saw him put a new spin – personal, contemporary and at times deliciously dark – on traditional song.

Hold. Star. Return sees him explore more fully the world of antique electronica. In some ways, it is an attempt to recreate the sounds of his late-70s and early-80s youth, from the drum machine and synth experiments of the Sheffield scene to the soundtracks of those strange BBC sci-fi series, via disco and the trippy, post-industrial folk of Current 93. But as is often the case with Jaycock’s work, there are further layers to be explored: personal reflections on the turbulent politics of the time, explorations of place, a constant awareness of the slippery nature of memory and time.

A fuzzy, off-kilter melodicism pervades much of the album. Opener White Tea From The Vending Machine pits chirpy electronics against a darker underlying throb, while Jaycock’s vocals reveal his ear for a pop tune. Coming Up In Paris is like early Human League or Cabaret Voltaire if they’d been fronted by Syd Barrett. Synths ripple and press against the edges of melody: the song explores the tension between focus and looseness. Space Bar Hold Star Return creates a dramatic, three-dimensional Pet Shop Boys-style block of electronic sound, then softens the edges with gentle vocals, pillowy chords, and a series of bleeps and tweets.

Among the many dichotomies that Jaycock presents is the contrast between the rural and the urban, and the way both can exist together in the context of folk history and hauntology. A song like Bird Food, for example, seems like a payoff between the industrial and the pastoral, culminating in a muted, ironic singalong coda. The surreal snippet General Custer Go Down There inhabits the A-roads that run through the ancient and mystical landscapes of south-west England.

Jaycock is also aware of the contrasts between interior and exterior landscape and between the traditional preoccupations of folk music and the grubbier lyrical predilections of modernism and realism. The refrain ‘Ashtray chair, maiden fair’, on the brilliant Ashtray Chair, sounds like a kind of invocation, a spell to bind innocence to experience or to consolidate the waking world and the realm of dream. Northern Line To Polar seems to operate on the beguiling line between physical travel and psychic journeying.

An album highlight is I’ll Take Two Of Those, where the synths crackle into sparkling life over an evocative spoken prelude before a dark and sprawling soundscape envelopes the melody. The outro achieves a kind of rapture as Jaycock’s singing mirrors the speech of collaborator James Yorkston to stunning effect. Elsewhere, All Blood And Glass is a rippling slow-burner, while Torpoint Ferry’s opening synths waver alluringly between flighty and eerie. This kind of juxtaposition crops up all over this weirdly beautiful album which manages to be constantly aware of the past and yet never sentimental.