True North Duo – Time and Materials 

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A stripped down format of the band with just Kristen Grainger and Dan Wetzel on guitar and ukulele, this was actually released a few months back but with no PR backing or push. Catching up now, it’s a collection of American folksy tunes, both covers and originals, with a strong air of melancholia to songs like the broken relationship heartbreak of ‘Sound of Losing You’ living in a “house that’s grown quiet as a church on a Monday”, ‘At Your Door’ (“Let me stay one more time/In your house that once was mine”) and a cover of the old Carter Family hit ‘I Know What It Means To Be Lonesome’. There are more upbeat notes with ”Til I Have You’ (“I have this road and a light to travel by/Two good legs since I can’t have wings to fly/Hoping forty dollars is enough to get me by/’Til I cross that river and I’m home and dry”), Richard Shindell’s optimistic ‘Next Best Western’ and Graham Sharp’s parenthood-themed ‘Honey On My Tongue’. The banjo accompanied ‘Motormouth’ is basically Wetzel’s answer to Johnny Cash’s ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ but the strongest are the storysongs: ‘Jessica’, about a bar-playing singer in “cowboy boots and a thrift store dress/Tiger tattoo on her chest”; the loneliness, depression and likely suicide of ‘No Way To Live’; ‘Doris Dean’ sung in the voice of a woman named after a wild west trick rider wishing she could have emulated her and “Maybe everything would have turned out differently for me” rather than just a hill of beans; character study ‘Still Life Café’ staffed by world-weary immigrants with unfulfilled dreams; and ‘The Luthier’, about a boy and the tree from which (like Wetzel) he built the guitar he plays. It would be a shame if this remained an undiscovered gem.

Mike Davies
https://www.fatea-records.co.uk/magazine/news/DrivingTest34/