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Pete Bruntnell has listeners pinned to the ground with his flawless fourteenth album – and there’s precious little escape from his gorgeous songs and melodies, which feature several misfits and poor unfortunates.
Since he set out on a musical career in the early 1990s, Peter Bruntnell has rightly gained critical recognition for producing records of a high standard while maintaining a reputation as something of an undiscovered national treasure.
With ‘Houdini and the Sucker Punch’, he’s produced a record that reaches the sort of heights he’s previously scaled on classic albums such as ‘Normal For Bridgewater’ and ‘Ends of the Earth’.
The title of Bruntnell’s latest opus refers to the alleged incident which resulted in Houdini’s death (when a student asked the master escapologist if it was true that he could resist hard punches to the abdomen – and proceeded to test the claim to its limits).
The opening title track is a classic Bruntnell tune; its melodic hooks contrast with the plaintive undertow of its lyrics. In terms of subject matter, it’s one of a number of his songs that are open to interpretation, but lyrically, it reads as much of a love song as anything – Houdini declaiming to his romantic interest that: “I would not know how to leave you lying on the bed / With my arm pinned underneath you”, while the song ends with the repeated chorus line that “Everybody’s hurt”.
The title track is one of seven co-writes on the album with Bill Ritchie, Bruntnell’s longstanding writing partner based in Canada. The secret weapon on this track – and others on the record like Stamps of the World – is the evocative sound of Eric Heywood’s pedal steel. Their collaboration dates back to Bruntnell’s second album, ‘Normal For Bridgewater’ (1999). Heywood’s virtuoso playing is so good that you can see why he’s often used by fellow luminaries such as Ray Lamontagne, The Jayhawks, Jim White, Alejandro Escovedo and Joe Henry.
The following track, The Flying Monk, is about an 11th-century Benedictine prelate called Eilmer from Malmesbury in Gloucestershire who’d read and believed the Greek myth of Daedalus. His ill-fated, one-off attempt at flight (“Too much hope’s gonna weigh you down”, sings Bruntnell) resulted in a severe fall which broke both his legs. But if the flying monk was doomed to a hard landing, Bruntnell’s dedication to him here achieves take-off velocity with consummate ease. It’s quite simply one of the best songs he’s written, its gorgeous harmonies complemented by some Johnny Marr sound-a-like guitar, allied to some expressive harmonica playing from Bruntnell mid-song.
Yellow Gold was inspired by Bruntnell’s road trip from Wyoming to Montana after the second leg of his US tour in 2022 supporting Son Volt and features another misfit – this time a Welsh gold miner who succumbed to a premature death by blowing up a mountain which took its revenge by falling on top of him. The song is a rabble-rousing, twangy, suitably Celtic-sounding number that barrels along in double quick time, featuring long-time compatriot James Walbourne on guitar.
The pace of this song is in marked contrast to its follow-up, the gorgeous balladic sounding Sharks, which features Laura Anstee mournful sounding cello, a perfect foil to our songwriting protagonist who is metaphorically “lost in the kitchen, with no place to go” hoping against hope that his female partner will come to his rescue: “I just wanna be like the people on TV / And you could be the girl that saves me from the sharks in this world”.
The lead single, Out of the Pines, explains why a musician’s life is one to which Bruntnell’s probably best suited–“I’ve never been much good at getting up in the morning”– but it’s Stephen Malkmus-flecked guitar stylings and mellifluous tunefulness underscores the fact that Pete was probably wise to take his own career advice and find his metier as one of the UK’s best singer songwriters.
Let There Be A Scar continues the album’s extremely high standards, with its subtle Everly Brothers Let It Be Me-style melody and harmonies, its occasional lapse into Neil Young style grunge, while Mark Spencer’s Hammond and piano add what Bruntnell calls “a very vibey feel”-
Stamps of the World, which first featured on Bruntnell’s ‘Ringo Woz Ere’ in 2012, gives Eric Heywood full licence to fully demonstrate his pedal steel chops again, while ‘No Place Like Home’ is redolent of the Byrds at their jangly finest.
The slightly doleful and melancholic Jimmy Mac closes out the album. Its lyrics a deft nod to Holland-Dozier-Holland with the lines, “And Jimmy Mac, when are you coming back? Will I ever see your smile?”
A collection of misfits and unfortunates may well feature on this record, but there are absolutely no missteps in a ten-song collection that is bound to feature on many people’s Albums of the Year for 2024.
Houdini and the Sucker Punch (4th October 2024) Domestico Records
Order via: Bandcamp
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