Cortney Tidwell – ‘Cortney Tidwell’ (Ever) Released 13/03/06

Cortney Tidwell's debut mini-album starts with space, a portentous rumble and some stark pickings on electric guitar. Then a distant voice and suddenly, the soundfield of 'Mama From The Mountain' changes. An uncomfortably intimate keyboard and this voice, female is in your ears, “Hanging down on golden leaves”- lonely, naïve, wise, existing on some obscure margin of melancholic ecstasy. Suddenly, drums - monotonous, eerie and slightly off-kilter, just a little out of time with the rest of the sound. “So roll on, black river”. The beat accelerates, threatening to usher a change but when that change comes, its as a stall and collapse.

This is all just the first minute and a half of a 6 track mini album that is so sublimely unpredictable, stretching the somewhat ludicrous notion of alt. country in a million different ways. 6 Songs, but songs that are allowed to breathe and grow and have a logical structure of their own. The studio plays its part, whispering atmospherics, twisting the voice but naturally, organically. There is such a profound variety and depth in this transmission from alien planet Earth that it would be wrong to say more so as to not spoil the eerie pleasures within. Just to say though that a debut release of such a beguilingly haunting confidence as this beckons great great possibilities. These nocturnal vignettes will colour your days and nights and make the world strange for a while. Can you ask of music any more than that? Come wander in this strange space.