Repentance Creek by Karl Farren

‘REPENTANCE CREEK’
The debut album by Karl Farren

If Tom Waits went bail for Johnny Cash, and together they broke parole, drove all night through the Carolinas, PJ Harvey behind the wheel, Townes Van Zandt and Son House on the radio; ran the border and holed up in a cabin in the Wicklow hills where Elvis Costello helped Nick Drake finally find his sense of humour....this might come close....

This is backwoods soul music: melodic, lyrical and contemporary, yet rooted in an older, mythic soil; a rich and ancient sediment of storytelling and folk memory. Karl threads his bruised tenor voice, alternately warm and honeyed or scuffed and worn as a favourite old leather jacket, through acoustic and resonator guitars, brushed drums, double bass, Hammond, Wurlitzer, fiddle and mandolin.

Whether testifying like a revival tent preacher or intimating in a tender falsetto, his finely-crafted songs take you on a journey from the grit of working-class Dublin, through the peat bogs of an Irish glen to the red earth of the Australian bush; from the cool of a back porch in the Appalachians to the funky heat of the Mississippi delta.