All Time High
Jimmy Wahlsteen
Available from Candyrat Records.
A review written for the Folk & Acoustic Music Exchange
by Mark S. Tucker
(progdawg@hotmail.com).

If you thought Jimmy Wahlsteen’s 181st Songs (here) was great, wait until you hear All Time High, a CD even more richly harmonic than its predecessor. Moreover, I thought it impossible, beyond the music, to get any cleaner and more sparkling a sound than Wahlsteen himself produced last time out, but, yow, was I ever mistaken! Just goes to show how much that extra smidgen of bandwidth and that last touch of exotic acumen can broaden out and even more luminously clarify what was already perfection. I’d venture to say this is pretty much the last word in recording, but Wahlsteen has a way of introducing something new each time he appears on the scene, so I’ll content myself to just marvelling over the sonics for the moment and pass on to the playing.

As ever, the guitarist dwells in an enviable estate of positive outlook, irrepressible élan, and azurine thoughtfulness. Almost every song demonstrates that clearly while the pensive numbers, like Mindlessness, just kinda glow in the middle of a breathless moment suspended in memory and reflection. Catch, too, the subtle background welling up and then the overt and covert timbral shifts in the cut, follow how such things manifest many times in the disc, almost without a trace of announcing themselves, sliding in like spirit outflowing whisperingly from everywhere and nowhere. Hitched for Life is a wedding song written for his wife, a tune that possesses a certain traditional air while dancing within itself, a delight enticing the ear with decorous classicality and modernist inflections.

More than once in a number of places, a lightning-swift riff launches already complicated finger-picking above the melodies, mercurially contrasting what soon catches up to the impulse then drops back in tempo. Being a CandyRatter, Wahlsteen can play not only as though two or three people at once but polyrhthmically while doing so. I’ll warn that there’s dubbing going on this time around, but that’s a caution accompanied with a grin of delight because I’ve been waiting to see what would happen when this label’s daunting players decided to shed a bit of their immaculate purity and synch up. Well, as shown here, the result is as wondrous and headily complex as could be hoped for. I hold the same enamorment for CandyRat that I do for ECM, and I think the former has become what Windham Hill was heading towards, taking up the evolution Ackerman & Co. had worked up to just before that estimable imprint’s collapse, one of the too few vanguards interested in the highest possibilities of artistic expression so deep that it serves as a much-needed progressive anchor in an era where retrogression and pandering constitute the norm, indeed the lamentable evidence of our culture’s decay. Here, I needn’t over-emphasize, in discs like this, we have the curative.

Track List:
• Halifaxation
• 12 Rooms
• Trickle-Down FX
• All Time High
• Forehead Slapping • Mindlessness
• Catenary Curves
• Hitched for Life
• My Three Page Memo
• Efaristo

All songs written by Jimmy Wahlsteen.

Edited by: David N. Pyles
(dnpyles@acousticmusic.com)
Copyright 2011, Peterborough Folk Music Society.
This review may be reprinted with prior permission and attribution.

Jimmy’s album All Time High will be released on Candyrat Records November 15, 2011. Stay tuned for videos for songs “Halifaxation” and “Hitched for Life”.

Jimmy recently spoke to Jeff Kralka from LickMyAxe.com about how his current tour with Don Ross was going this summer in Canada.

The tour started off with an appearance at the Canadian Guitar Festival in Loughborough, Ontario, and a great gig at Hugh’s Room in Toronto.

Jimmy also had a busy spring touring throughout Germany and Sweden is support of his debut album for Candyrat Records, Akustik Guitar in Germany featured Jimmy on the cover with an in depth look at the concept and recording of “181st Songs”.

This summer has once again been a very busy one for Baskery. The band has been touring out on the festival circuit in Europe and North America with highlight shows at Azkena Rock Festival in Spain, Evolution Festival in the UK, Waterfront Blues Festival in Portland and at the Calgary Folk Festival in Canada.
Their summer tour takes them into September with treks through Texas and all the way up to Alaska.

Sunniva at Watefront Blues Festival – Portland, OR

Baskery has hit the road again with the first in a series of many appearances at festivals around the world this year while final touches are being done on the new album.

They recently stopped by BBC Radio Ulster in Belfast for an interview and unplugged performance.
Pictured below are Sunniva, BBC Radio host Lynette Fay, Greta and Stella.