Naomi Bedford and Paul Simmonds - Strange News Has Come To Town (2024)

Strange News Has Come To Town Press Release

Naomi Bedford and Paul Simmonds

Released June 28th via Dusty Willow Recordings/Proper Distribution

'Strange News Has Come To Town' is the fourth collaboration for folk roots country hybrid duo Naomi Bedford and Paul Simmonds. It follows the dramatic introduction to Bedford's unique high lonesome vocal style in the murder ballad heavy album 'Tales of the Weeping Willow'; the celebration of protest and exposition of madness in 'A History of Insolence' and 'Songs My Ruiner Gave Me' respectively, and finally the Appalachian celebration of 2019's 'Singing It All Back Home'.

Four years on there is 'Strange News....' Commenced the week before lockdown and beset by pandemic, financial collapse and health issues, this time personal issues are to the fore. Nowhere more so than the opening track 'Optimist' where all the above travails are breezily confronted in a homage to one of the duo's most essential qualities - positive resilience.

Overseen once again by producer/multi-instrumentalist Ben Walker, 'Strange News...' overflows with great ensemble playing from the fluid cast of musicians that Bedford and Simmonds have gathered to support their projects. Vocally, there's the aching high harmonies of Rich Leo, the bluesy grit of Donna Edmead and the cool Americana cream of Xan Tyler, yet still Bedford's voice rises above all to infuse each vocal with her trademark wounded yearning; never more effectively than on the raw tradition of 'A Blacksmith Courted Me', the strange, ambient swamp of 'Haunted River' and the euphoric homage to anxiety, 'Happiness Is A Way Of Travelling'.

Elsewhere, erstwhile partner Paul Simmonds joins the fray with two rambling and surreal narratives, "I've Got A Fever' and 'Opposite Day'; the former a lockdown horror movie resolved into a meditation on reincarnation and liberty, the latter an inverted Quest ballad set during a dystopian odyssey through post truth Britain in search of 'what a man desires' via nursery rhymes, wah wah guitar and a brutal lydian scale.

Other standouts are the blissed-out Americana of Justin Currie co-write 'I Love You Too'; all pedal steel and Everly Brothers harmonies and the dark folk allegory 'Asylum', a phantasmagorical tale of the fatal adventures of three would migrants.

The album ends with the rural ballad 'The Lapwing's Call', set appropriately in the first reviving Spring at the end of lockdown. Strange News Has Come To Town, long overdue, long awaited and worth every minute.