- Jamie Hutchings is what you'd call a 'lifer'. Having formed the classic (and underappreciated) Bluebottle Kiss in the early ‘90s, he's spent the intervening decades following his muse in that band, the somewhat similarly-minded Infinity Broke, and the recent The Tall Grass, a collaboration with Crow's Peter Fenton. In between he's released a handful of solo records, ranging from the dark debut of 2002's The Golden Coach to the lush pop of 2008's His Imaginary Choir. With his latest solo missive, Bedsit, he lands somewhere between those two records with a set of songs that are starkly minimalist yet unfailingly romantic in mood. Decamping to a property at Mount Rankin, inland of the Blue Mountains, Hutchings recorded the album with a small group of musicians to analogue tape in early 2016. Of the record, Hutchings states: "I’d wanted to make a record as stark as this for many years but somehow my songs would always bully me into giving them more. This time they didn’t... It was recorded at a time when I was returned to the world of me, myself and I."
Placing Hutchings' heavily reverbed voice out front of acoustic guitar, some double bass and occasional piano and other accoutrements, Bedsit conjures feelings of cold inland summer nights, where the heat of day has receded to leave behind a burnt landscape and people drained of the ability to trust their dehydrated minds. It's languid and relaxed, and yet there's a mild psychedelia inherent. The record starts out as it means to continue, with the seven minute Second Winter featuring Hutchings' speak-sing vocals, telling a story of a winter that seems like it will never end - the song feels appropriately chilly with its imagery of blocks of ice for feet and spacious instrumentation and features the album's only moment of classic Bluebottle Kiss style guitar-wrangling - smothered in reverb, of course. Elsewhere, It's On Me lays its psychedelia bare with a heavily echoed harmonica solo, one of many examples of Hutchings utilising well placed but minimal use of extra instrumentation to great effect.
The record finishes with perhaps its strongest trio of songs. Above The Rain is a collection of fluttering instrumentation that floats through the cloudless nighttime skies and lifts Hutchings' vocals up along with them. Shadow On The Lung is a beautiful, heartfelt piano-led number, featuring Hutchings' sister Sophie on said instrument. Finally, Here Comes The Frost is, at least sonically, the most upbeat, jangly number on the record. It finishes the record on an uptick, a feeling of optimism that is not misplaced given what has preceded it. With Bedsit, Hutchings has made a record that combines melancholy with comfort, a collection of songs that embrace with their cool spaciousness.
- Cameron Smith.