Peter Mulvey - Silver Ladder (2014)

Peter Mulvey has been around the singer-songwriter/Americana scene for a long time now – there’s pushing on for 20 years worth of back catalogue – but he’s right to be particularly excited about this new release. Produced by Chuck Prophet, there’s a gritty rock edge to much of this album, and a willingness to experiment with new sounds that produces some excellent results.

I’ve always associated Peter Mulvey with the New England Americana scene; he was based in Boston for a while and amongst many other projects made an excellent album as the trio Redbird with Kris Delmhorst and Jeffrey Foucault. He has recently moved back to his native Wisconsin and, wherever this fits in with his recent work, it seems to have been an inspired move to team up with Chuck Prophet. The songs run a wide range of mood and style; introspection plays its part but so does the kind of quirky humour that suggests he’s always got the eye of the outsider, poking his finger at the ways of the world. With a voice that lends itself well to rock music - there’s a husky, attitudinal edge in there – the most fun probably comes from the songs that rock out a bit as if he’s letting himself off the leash and thoroughly enjoying it. One of these, You Don’t Have To Tell Me, has the easy driving skill that makes him sound like John Hiatt’s little brother, which is to say that he sounds blooming good.

Across the twelve songs here he demonstrates that he has plenty of strings to his bow. The duet Where Did You Go? (with Anita Suhanin I've learned, though no details on the sleeve that I have) is exquisite, an end-of-love song dripping with pain and longing, the sparsely elegant arrangement a work of art in itself. A couple of tracks towards the end of the album are real curveballs; Copenhagen Airport is an intense, febrile miniature focusing on a very male moment of fascination with all the beautiful, unreachable women passing before his eyes. If You Shoot at a King You Must Kill Him is similarly febrile and intense; this is poetry set to music, a fevered, almost apocalyptic dream vision that I haven’t made much sense of yet but nonetheless fascinates for its willingness to head off into little charted waters. You get everything from the smoothly beautiful What Else Was It?, a killingly seductive number in every respect, to the edgy difficulty of If You Shoot at a King. You get high quality, intelligent music-making all round on Silver Ladder, a perfect example of the kind of talent that the Americana label seeks to rescue from obscurity. The man is in Ireland just now and will be playing a few gigs in the UK at the end of the month – worth catching if you can.