release - james blackshaw - all is falling

type: album

released: 24th august 2010

label: young god

genre: american primitivism, psychedelic folk, minimalism

James Blackshaw's latest presentation is a single piece that, in its eight constituent parts, further takes his sound from its folky, fingerpicked beginnings and matures it into a haunting modern classical suite, with simple arpeggios and clean production. The longer passages we're used to are left until the end – the final two tracks take up half the length of the album.

The first part of All is Falling is a stately and slow piano loop, the lower end becoming gradually darker and tenser as arpeggios at the higher end are brought in and out. It's a retreat from the virtuoso guitar we've seen from him recently, and the heavy use of atmospheric sounds on 2008's Litany of Echoes. This is something stripped down, and closer to modern classical.

Part 2 is quieter at first, his twelve-string acoustic guitar playing a slow and mournful melody as strings gradually accompany its cycle up to a cinematic climax, where romantic violins invite faster playing without fully abandoning that restraint set down in the opening minutes of the album. The next song is more upbeat, a swelling of strings and tinkling piano parts keeping an urgent pace. Part 4 continues this tension, with different rhythms working alongside each other and colliding to noisy strings and key changes towards the end, as Part 5 concluded this first half of the album in a similar vein.

The closing notes of the first half are continued into Part 6, which acts as a segue between the first five songs and the longer ones at the end. Here sparse and heavy timpani keeps time alongside two-part counting, feeling more like tribal chanting. All this is done with a simple guitar pattern playing to time with the beat and urgent strings beneath. By the end of this short passage there is only counting, and then silence.

The penultimate part of All is Falling is twelve minutes long, and while that would be normal on any of Blackshaw's earlier works, it's the longest here by some way, and starts with guitar and cello, played in a more enunciated way than most of Parts 1-5. After one and a half minutes a lone violin joins. The sound assembles into a drum-led crescendo at around the sixth minute and unfolds for a further three until harsh, dissonant strings take full control of the sound, cascading and falling around the diminishing guitar, and fulfilling the images suggested in the album title.

Part 8 is something of a recovery – an eight-minute drone that pulsates warmly in its ambience, free from the harshness of the previous track, but also the strings and piano that provided most of the sound on the album. It brings the concept full circle and shows off Blackshaw's ability to, without needing to play guitar at the level he's already shown himself to be capable of, create real psychedelic beauty.