Tom Rodwell
Wood & Waste
GENRE: Rock & Roll
RELEASE DATE: October 22nd 2021
LABEL: Fireplace Recordings
DISTRO: Cargo Records UK

FORMATS:

* 180g vinyl LP 

* digipak-style CD

* FLAC 88khz download

* WAV 

* MP3

Produced by Tom Rodwell & Raphael Mann.
Engineered and mixed by Jordan Stone.

Recorded on 2” tape at Roundhead Studios, NZ.
Mastering and lacquer cut from 1/2” mixdowns by Kevin Gray, Cohearant, LA.

AAA entirely analogue production.

First pressing 180gm by audiophile press Pallas, Germany.

TRACKLISTING
A1 - Don’t Be a Fugitive All Your Life
A2 - Keep On Knockin’
A3 - Plenty Time
A4 - Carry On
B1 - Touch Me Like a Teddybear 
B2 - She Got Me Boiling 
B3 - Small Town
B4 - Make Believe 
B5 - Dead End Road

Nine ragged songs that interweave supple dance rhythms with a writerly taste for the surreal, Wood & Waste is a charmingly decadent record from singer-guitarist Tom Rodwell, (best known as frontman for Auckland arthouse blues institution Storehouse and itinerant session man for the likes of Don McGlashan).  Like the best short stories, Wood & Waste transforms skeletal structures into something fleshy and feverish, melding together outlandish influences with both improvisation and minimalist, dream-logic songwriting.

The album’s centrepiece is “She Got Me Boiling”, a juggernaut of psychedelic calypso grafted to mindless riffs on cannibalism that would make the Mighty Sparrow blush.  Driven by Rodwell’s trademark bass-heavy guitar and animated carnival drums from NZ free improv notorieties Chris O’Connor and Jeff Henderson, it’s a fiendishly irresistible piece of music, as is the absurdist one-chord bottleneck slide freak-out “Touch Me Like a Teddybear” - a lascivious black hole of meaninglessness and satire. Elsewhere “Keep on Knockin’” subverts a grim Bo Diddley beat with dissonant Mellotron in praise of Edward Hopper and William Morris, while “Plenty Time” is a species of prog rhumba set in Roman Britain, indebted to Nigerian giant King Sunny Ade.

Tracked on tape at Roundhead Studios, via The Who’s old Neve console, Wood & Waste is an entirely analog production with no digital conversion at any stage.  Mastering and lacquer cut directly from 1/2” mixdown tapes by the legendary Kevin Gray in LA.  This first run of 180gram LP’s is by audiophile press Pallas in Germany.