Duke Garwood - Emerald Palace (Butterfly)

South London is big, quiet, cheap, weird. It´s where people go to nurse diminishing dreams and unexpected babies and idiosyncratic, regretful music. And the South London blues, according to charismatic travellin´ man Duke Garwood, is a clanging, loping blues, all pots and pans percussion and monotone Tom Waits growl via Trout Mask Replica and Deptford post-punk mavericks This Heat. What Garwood may lack in vocal dexterity he more than makes up for in arrangement skills, celebrating the inherent atonality of these 18 songs by upping the percussive elements so that they´re the rattling, grooving centre of tracks more vigorous tracks like `9 Peace´.
Trains, birdsong and laughter are often audible, adding a singularly English air to what initially appears to be Americana embellished with junked-up temple bells and gongs, and casually tender ballads like `Flame Song´ and `Swans On The Water´ come off the sweetest, like tearfully tipsy field recordings from a large, unkempt garden.