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Ben Reynolds - Two Wings CD, Strange Attractors Audio House

£10, including postage anywhere in the world.

-------- Ben Reynolds' 2009 album for Tompkins Square again shows his quietly elegant skill on acoustic guitar. With the lovely "Skylark" starting things with, essentially, a perfect pop hook -- it's one of the most immediately catchy numbers Reynolds has yet recorded, building to a soft but strong conclusion -- How Day Earnt Its Night maintains a necessary balancing act between the familiar and the quietly exploratory. If he does not completely give himself over to the full kind of agog rapture that his countryman James Bradshaw does, it's his skill in the vein of someone like Bert Jantsch that always comes to the fore. Hearing the pleasant touch of "Risen" also calls to mind someone like John Fahey at his most straightforward, as on the Christmas albums -- it's immediate, familiar, and warm rather than a bold challenge to expectations -- while the wheezing harmonica on "All Gone Wrong Blues" is a nice little exploration in a standard form. A subtle sense of drama gets aired at points -- the sudden pauses and extended notes on "The Virgin Knows" is a good example, while the mournful progression of "England" suggests a land that's been lost somewhere in the mists, and perhaps not happily. There's one full sequence of exploration that deserves note, though -- the three-part title track, portraying the cycle of a day in sometimes ominous terms (thus the first part's title, "Dawn Hurt") and with an air of nervous, plucked tension that never fully disappears even as the song moves towards its steady conclusion on a last swirl of a quick, rhythmic melody. There's also a good humor that crops up as well -- why else have an easygoing ramble of a performance be given the name "Death Sings"? ALLMUSIC

--------- "Two Wings effortlessly weaves shimmering melodic lines together to form spontaneous compositions of dazzling depth and clarity. Incorporating a variety of pacing techniques with his fingerpicking style, Reynolds explores a linearity that harkens back to the American ragas of Robbie Basho, while exposing Middle Eastern influences much like the acoustic trickery of Sir Richard Bishop. The last tune on Two Wings is a written composition, utterly graceful yet striking in its similarities to the spontaneous compositions, underlying the lyrical quality in Reynolds' music making. Two Wings is a remarkably unique, non-traditional take on the steel string tradition from a budding musical talent." SUNFLOWER CHAKRA MILK

--------- "On Two Wings, he joins fellow performers on Strange Attractors Audio House like Glenn Jones and Harris Newman in exclusively exploring the acoustic guitar, doing so on five songs with sprightly intensity. Unlike the sometimes too-obvious Fahey-isms of many of his comrades in the field -- not a bad thing, but still a bit wearying after a while -- Reynolds leavens that particular mix with a sense of his own inventive delicacy. It's beholden to other figures in turn, admittedly -- the invocation of Sir Richard Bishop on the release's cover sticker is not unwarranted, and it's often quite audible on songs like "Gravity Never Wins," which could almost be an acoustic version of a Sun City Girls melody. But the lovely "Here Toucheth Blues," which concludes the album on a sweet, almost skipping note, shows that he can be relatively straightforward with the best of them, to fine effect. His most striking moment on the album, though, ranks among his most original -- the zoned drones of "Revolution," a seesawing series of grinding tones over which gentler melodies then arrive. It's a marvelous one-man band result that's both disconcerting and captivating. Not far behind is the dramatic conclusion of "Ewige Weisheit (For Meister Eckhart)," which ends the song in a sudden jump-off-the-cliff sprawl of notes that's breathtaking to hear." ALLMUSIC