NICK HUDSON – KANDA TEENAGE HONEY

By RingMaster Review on June 13, 2024 • ( 0 )

There are many ways to describe Kanda Teenage Honey, the new album from UK singer songwriter NICK HUDSON. It is a release that is cinematically enveloping yet atmospherically personal and one as worldly observational as it is a place of open and honest intimacy with tracks aligning the experimentally bold and the introspectively raw. There will be many more descriptions we and many others will lay at its feet but the simplest and most apt is that the album is one of if not the most compelling adventure to come along in a fair while.

Brighton-based, Hudson has never been restrained in pushing the creative envelope in his songwriting, music and invention as proven by previous offerings such as the richly acclaimed Font Of Human Fractures and the K69996ROMA:EP. He is often tagged as an Avant-pop artist but listening to his music and especially within the exploratory vastness of Kanda Teenage Honey, the reality of the richness of genres his imagination and esurient composing embraces is swiftly unfurled. Even given that richness again the simple ‘singer songwriter’ is the best tag, yet that only belies or hides the vastness of adventure within his new exploration.

Largely recorded in a huge former Soviet movie studio in Georgia under the shadow of the Ukraine war, a scene and conflict that certainly is one of the major sparks lyrically and musically for the record, Kanda Teenage Honey also embraces the craft of numerous guests including Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite, Stuart Dahlquist (Asva, Burning Witch, Sunn O))), Lizzy Carey (Bat For Lashes), Robert Wyatt collaborator Alfreda Benge, Christopher Nell (legendary German performer and collaborator of US theatre visionary Robert Wilson), and soprano prodigy Poppy Efemey. The album was recorded with Ilya Lukashev in Tbilisi and mixed by Toby Driver of Kayo Dot who also features within alongside many highly talented Georgian musicians and Hudson’s friend Seva, a Russian dissident who fled the FSB, having worked for Navalny.

For us Kanda Teenage Honey is like an audile hall of mirrors, each track sharing a unique reflection of contemplation within a general exploration of, as Hudson explains, “preserving the sacred from the corrosively kleptocratic institutions of church and state: spiritual and material kleptocracy.” It opens with Khevsureti, the track slowly spreading its suggestive arms in orchestral intimacy. Melancholy, which pervades the album throughout brings beauty and disquiet closely together, wrapping around Hudson’s evocative thoughts and impacting tones as poetic captivation soaks the track as too the drama of its orchestral and atmospheric intimation.

The album’s compelling opening is matched within the rock pop musing of For My Silence, a rousing moment of piano and vocal driven thought and craft, and in turn across the geopolitical tension of Sky Burial While Alive, a piece of music gliding in on suggestive sonic disturbance to prey on the imagination with post punk/gothic rock nurtured design.

Both tracks were a magnet for involvement with the following Hollow Man drawing rock instincts into its progressive kaleidoscope of melodic enterprise and subsequent acoustic musing to again place an evocative hold on ears and thought as it examined the turmoil of war. An ever evolving track, its powerful hold is matched by that of the piano rock ballad cured This Heat where Hudson richly croons with intimate experience as his fuel while Hachiko shares vocal and emotional magnetism straight after, Hudson’s vocals alone standing as storyteller, atmosphere weaver and provocative spark.

The following pair of tracks, Archipelago and Bardo, pay tribute to two very close friends of Hudson who died within six months of each other during his first year in Georgia, the requiems borne of vocal/piano cast beauty and sonic conjuring respectively. The exceptional second of the two shares a volatile landscape of emotion and craft in reaching a noise cascading crescendo before flowing into a dark rock courting within its mercurial landscape.

The likes of the piano/voice bound Hunters and Unspent Youth in its Latin infused symphonic and electronic travels again only fascinated as they seduced ear and imagination alike while Seva had the latter gripped through its thought evoking and emotion igniting shadows and increasingly feral sounds before In Praise Of Venerable Jorge caressed with folk kilned classical guitar hands with the alignment of Hudson’s vocals with those of Christopher Nell just as enthralling.

A force field of fascination descended yet again around the dark beauty and ambient drama of Catherine In The Curate’s Garden, the track providing another peak in our captivation across Kanda Teenage Honey, that dramatic prowess just as alluring within the deep intimacy and sounds shared by Ortolan before Bad Ghost Vs Good Boy brought its own individual haunting and arousing virulence to ears and thought.

All three tracks beguiled as they involved paving the way for the oblique beauty and evocative captivation of Danube Blues, the album’s final track epitomising the beauty and creative drama of Nick Hudson’s songwriting, composing and artistry.

From start to finish creative trespass and seduction shaped the mastery and beauty of Kanda Teenage Honey alongside rich enterprise and soul-searching adventure, the album with every moment simply growing in presence and deep captivation.

Kanda Teenage Honey is out now; available digitally and on CD with an 8-page full colour booklet @ https://nickhudsonindustries.bandcamp.com/album/kanda-teenage-honey and to stream on Spotify and Apple Music. Also released is Hudson’s new book, The Land Exists So The Seas Don’t Argue, showcasing a decade of lyrical output in five albums plus ephemera with a foreword by renowned Scottish author Chris Kelso.