KEVIN HOUSE: Gutter Pastoral

Kevin House

Gutter Pastoral

© 2004 Bongo Beat (767003196627)

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It is an intoxicating breath of very early Bruce Cockburn and Leonard Cohen framed with a certain joyful sadness like Chet Baker or Nick Drake.

notes

Impressionistic, soulful, with vivid metaphors, Kevin House's songs are intimate, ornate; burnished with beautiful melodies that stay with you.

Gutter Pastoral, his debut album, is a dinner party where lyrical poetry, and hushed mournful music are the main course. Spooky little fairy tales are what engineer Gord Nichol said while in the process of recording the album - featuring guest musicians Samantha Parton (The Be Good Tanyas), trumpet player JP Carter (Millenium Project), upright bass player Russell Sholberg (Tony Wilson Quintet), saw player Enzo Garcia (Jolie Holland), and pianist Mike Derrick (Radiogram).

At times bringing to mind a more weatherbeaten Nick Drake, there's something of the European chanson tradition at work here also; with a jazz influence creeping in here and there plus unusual guitar voicings, and strange ambient nuances.

Born in England, Kevin immigrated to Canada in the early 1970s on the Queen Mary ocean liner. Growing up partly in the prairies and on the road with his parents; traveling and living in California and Arizona certainly influenced his later interests in Carnivals, sideshows, oddball history and storytelling. Living on the west coast of Canada, Kevin detoured to Manhattan for 2 years in 1999 playing clubs on the lower east side; making the New York pilgrimage as other writers before him for the inspiration that comes from such a diverse and energized city. Coming back from NYC as a painter as well as a songwriter, Kevin now splits his duties between painting circus sideshow banners and writing and performing songs. Written primarily on acoustic guitar and the Fun Machine (an antique home organ from the 1960s), Kevin's "spooky fairytale songs" can now be heard on his debut album, Gutter Pastoral.

"Kevin House was a struggling songwriter who was obsessed with carnivals. Then a fateful brush with a circus freak turned him into one of the world's hottest folk artists...who is much in demand of late for his very particular variety of portrait. Not just of dogs and kids, either, but of writers, poets, sideshow characters and assorted human oddities, all in the style of old carnival banners." The National Post

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* "Stylistically, the songs live somewhere on the deserted highway between Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, wavy smokey innocent words across simple musical ideas" Timothy Taylor, The National Post

* soulful, quiet, impressionistic mood pieces

* Kevin House has performed live with Gillian Welch,
Mercury Rev, Jim White, Evan Dando, and others

* CD is stickered with key info/press quotes

* an acclaimed painter whose work has been discovered and commissioned by actor Malcolm McDowell and CBC host Bill Richardson; as well as covers for Bark! and Girlyhead magazines; watch for upcoming art exhibits and related concerts throughout Canada / USA this year

* features guest co-vocal by Samantha Parton of The Be Good Tanyas; CD mastered by ex-Pure Todd Simko (first Tanyas CD)

* CD engineered by Gord Nicholl and John Armstrong of legendary punk bands Pointed Sticks, and The Modernettes

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KEVIN HOUSE : 2004 PRESS REVIEWS

"Spooky sounds from Canada's scarier Tom Waits. Kevin House's website homepage has a picture which consists of a slightly sinister, in a backwoods way, painting of him in front of a black and white photo of a brightly lit woodland. A more perfect visual rendition of this album would be hard to imagine, for these songs juxtapose the eerie with the ordinary, the stylised and disturbing with the straightforward and normal. Their very simplicity and surface innocence conceals a casually dark and desolate message. Listening to the album you feel the urge to keep glancing over your shoulder to see who or perhaps, more pertinently what, is watching you. The spirit of early Tom Waits infuses this music, with his metropolitan late night boho regret-filled world transposed to a more rural yet similar milieu. The key track is "Waltzing with the Hellhound", where Be Good Tanya Samantha Parton contributes appropriately otherworldly vocals, and that musical rarity, the saw, provides a midnight moonlight melody, for a tale where the narrator goes "like a thorn among the lilacs/one blue feather in a bow". Elsewhere "I don‚t believe in you" is a personalised Tom Waits‚ "Ghosts of Saturday Night", "Black Smoke Rising" a farewell speech from a dying man, and "Twilight in Wilderness" conjures a spectre to follow the singer home. Kevin House is also a painter of, judging by his website, naïve and disturbing images with more than a hint of voodoo about them, and while it is lazy and easy to compare his pictures with his songs the similarities are nonetheless clear and not altogether surprising. Not for the fainthearted to play with the lights off."

7 out of 10, Americana-UK.com, UK

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"Canada's Kevin House is a skilled songwriter with an incredible voice and a keen melodic sense.Gutter Pastoral is a resounding success. Kevin House is obviously one of the most solid and real upcoming talents in the world of soft folky pop. Recommended."

(Rating: 5++), BabySue.com, USA

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"...an album of beautiful disarming sadness...Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen... a revelation."

Roots Highway, Italy

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"Using everything from a simple guitar and voice to a Theremin, the atmosphere is rife with dark allusions and black humour. While House's closest influence seems to be early Red House Painters, there is also a rather strong sense of purpose and direction... inspiring through its beauty."

EXCLAIM!, Canada's national music paper.

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"Gutter Pastoral is never less than attention-getting. In fact, the only thing wrong with the disc is that it took so long to appear."

Georgia Straight, Vancouver

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"A moody little haunted house of a singer-songwriter album, with a priestly melancholy. While we await another album by the spooky Jim White, this is all soft rain, windswept streets and one man wondering. Leonard Cohen would not be uninterested; or at least, in his hyper-evolved state, Cohen would have the decency not to say he'd done it all before."

Rating 3 1/2 (out of 5)
Montreal Gazette, Montreal
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"... a little jewel, not always polished, but very seductive."

Rating 3 1/2 (out of 5)
Le Soleil (The Sun), Quebec City
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"The Vancouver based House once sang under the banner "folk noir". He won't ever be mistaken for a happy fella but a worn and raggedy joy comes across on his literate, melancholic debut. A low budget, low-effort, Gutter Pastoral proves you can do an awful lot with a banjo, saw, antique home organs and other offbeat sounds in the hands of players such as the Be Good Tanya's Sam Parton and assorted local jazz aces.."

The Vancouver Province, Vancouver
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reviews

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  • Twilight folk with a twisted edge. Disturbing yet comfortable.
    author: Tomas Thunberg

    With Gutter Pastoral Kevin House creates his own original twilight folk, much within tradition but with a twisted, odd edge to. Claustrophibic yet oozingly comfortable. I hope there's more to come, as a couple of songs doesn't quite seem to fulfill his true potential.

  • These songs are strange , beautiful , haunted , and heartfelt.
    author: giddy hayburn

    These are short haunted little spooky story songs that i coudnt seem to penetrate on the first few listens.Now they are growing like strange flowers of autumn and i cant stop listening ,or wondering if the world deserves such beauty.

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