Review – James Britt – Small Guitar Pieces

It’s 4 am and storming, I’m listening to this while I avoid sleep in favor of music. Declarative statements and plucky guitars. Parsing someones influences is always hard, but something I enjoy doing even when I’m wrong. Idk why but I keep getting a dismemberment plan vibe from this record. If you don’t know who that is, and enjoy this, then go back and check them out for something that sounds nothing like this but something like this.
This entire record consists of the sounds of a junior acoustic (and the case possibly), and nothing else, which is a concept I haven’t seen visited a lot outside of busking. This is much more intimate than busking. Lots of it feels like it may have been recorded sitting on the floor in the early morning sunlight.
These are psych anthems on acoustic guitar, big psych songs on acoustic guitars all shrunken and canned for your enjoyment. I can’t help but think these would sound amazing as huge constructions, because they all sound great deconstructed and exposed already.
James Britt has a deadpan vocal delivery that’s really effective at conveying a shitload of vibe to everything he’s saying. His voice is dark, and weird, and I enjoy this. His lyrics dance over specifics, and they all seem to have layers of meaning. This climate, for example, can ostensibly pass for being about climate change; but I’ve read this as being a more personal statement about perception.
I could of course be projecting, but it’s my fucking article so fuck you.
There aren’t lyrics to everything, or even most things on this record. They’re interspersed throughout these beautiful instrumental pieces built in Renoise out of “small guitar pieces”, and really these are the meat of the album. They’re very pretty pieces, but I can’t help but think I want to hear his voice more often, as the tracks with lyrics ended up my favorite ones. Fauna for example is fucking amazing. Weird uneasy tones overlaid with all these simple and pretty acoustic lines. The deep vocals in unison delivering statements, clipped. Pregnant with meaning. Manhattan is my favorite of the instrumentals because I’m a sucker for fast tingly noises, and the end is achingly sad and dissonant.
James Britt has put together a quality grouping of tracks on this record. I recommend everyone check it out either at 4 am in a thunderstorm, or in the early morning sunlight. Maybe day tripping…