Album: King Creosote

Rocket DIY, FENCE

As prime mover of the Fence Records Collective, whose number includes James Yorkston and Lone Pigeon, the label head Kenny Anderson, aka King Creosote, is on a low-key mission to alert us to the quirky new forms of folktronica coming from the East Neuk of Fife. With piano, organ, banjo and acoustic guitar settings embellished variously with melodica, pedal steel guitar and synthesiser squiggles, the arrangements have a geniality that recalls his fellow Scots folk-popster Colin MacIntyre. Anderson's songs, however, link the humdrum with quixotic flights of fancy. King Creosote songs invite ridicule - literally, in the case of "King Bubbles in Sand" - with their fascination for charging the quotidian with significance, as when Anderson adopts a laundry metaphor in "Twin Tub Twin" ("Things sometimes work out/ It all comes out in the wash/ But if it don't, there's no harm done"). In "Circle My Demise", he observes crows observing him; in "Spooned out on Tick" he regrets being too generous with his time; a

As prime mover of the Fence Records Collective, whose number includes James Yorkston and Lone Pigeon, the label head Kenny Anderson, aka King Creosote, is on a low-key mission to alert us to the quirky new forms of folktronica coming from the East Neuk of Fife. With piano, organ, banjo and acoustic guitar settings embellished variously with melodica, pedal steel guitar and synthesiser squiggles, the arrangements have a geniality that recalls his fellow Scots folk-popster Colin MacIntyre. Anderson's songs, however, link the humdrum with quixotic flights of fancy. King Creosote songs invite ridicule - literally, in the case of "King Bubbles in Sand" - with their fascination for charging the quotidian with significance, as when Anderson adopts a laundry metaphor in "Twin Tub Twin" ("Things sometimes work out/ It all comes out in the wash/ But if it don't, there's no harm done"). In "Circle My Demise", he observes crows observing him; in "Spooned out on Tick" he regrets being too generous with his time; and, best of all, in "Saffy Nool" he commiserates with a friend's dread of ageing: "You're growing old, you're growing tense/ I was past 35 before my face made much sense/ It means nothing." A small but welcome compendium of wit and wisdom.