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 arthouse blues institution Storehouse and itinerant session man. 

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 New Zealand 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 entirely on tape at Roundhead Studios, via The Who’s old Neve console, the LP of Wood & Waste is an exclusively 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. 

Digital iterations - CD and download - are all sourced directly from the lacquer cutting needle.