Wreckless Eric – Leisureland

Tapete

It has been a long, strange career for Eric Goulden. On the trail for the best part of fifty years, he is best known for the enduring universal smash “Whole Wide World”, and although numerous groups have been configured and discontinued over the years, his solo output was relatively sparse until he and his partner, singer-songwriter Amy Rigby, moved to the US. Hidden away in upstate New York, they put an album every now and again and go on the road to drill it into the general public’s consciousness.

Leisureland is his first in six years and also first since finding a home with Tapete feels like a smeared love-cum-resignation letter to the English south coast and embodies a huge variety of different styles. The album artwork highlights the home-brewed vibe, with photos of an old Rhythm Ace and a Tascam Portastudio, along with a map of an imaginary seaside town around which the fifteen songs presented here are loosely based.

His voice still has a nasal sharpness and an insouciant cool after all these years, with just a touch of a sneer to put across certain feelings. The opening “Southern Rock”, with its “dreaming of Memphis, Tennessee and California sun” is an unexpected opener, all milky keys and rocky rhythm; while the genteel countrified atmosphere of “Badhat Town” is yearning and smothered in reverbed guitar.

Although there are fifteen tracks presented here, some of them are like instrumental segues that evoke an atmosphere, leading from one vignette to another and are often filled with spindly electronic embellishments that sound as they Eric has enjoyed picking up cheap and out of fashion machinery over the years and thrown it into the small scale dramas that gradually unfold.

“Standing Water” is the linchpin around which the album revolves and its bleak Kinks-y image of a new town from which a would-be hero band grows is particularly affecting: “Hear the children playing in the fields where methane gas seeps silent through the trees” merges seamlessly with the motorik groove of the following “Standing Sunday Morning”. The old ’70s synth sounds and his ageless voice seem to travel from one side of the Atlantic to the other in the blink of an eye.

Elsewhere, the slowed down rockabilly groove of “The Old Versailles”, replete with twangy guitar and half-heard vocals, feels like the love part of the letter while, I couldn’t help but think of Mark Knopfler in the swingy drift of instrumental “The Tipping Point”. There is a sense of reverie in some of the tracks, a breath taken and rose-tinted spectacles wiped clean, the lenses showing things for what they really are. The acoustic guitar of “High Seas” has effects gently interceding all the way through, and the tapping rhythm and shaker vibe of “On The Move” is playful, and really gives the idea that Eric and the few pals included here had a great time putting the whole menu together.

I can’t help feeling that Eric shares his particular take on Englishness with the likes of The Kinks, Ian Dury and Madness, and that regardless of where he is in the world and the influences that those foreign climes might impose, it is that love of England that shines through here. I haven’t listened much to Wreckless Eric’s music in many years, but Leisureland is a genuinely affecting, affectionate and entertaining album that deserves to be listened to by everybody. The fact that it is shot through with weird, wibbly synths and dated Bontempi tones only makes it more loveable.

-Mr Olivetti-