Martin Ruby

r guitar, and recorded in a Soviet-era living room on a collection of vintage instruments. North’s unique songwriting is steeped in not only the melancholy grace of Nick Drake and Mark Linkous, but also the foggy noir of Johnny Cash’s American albums, and the somber meditativeness of Nick Cave’s most recent recorded output. A second album, Jacob and the Angel is atmospheric music with a capital “A”. Be it the slack-string resonator on the heartbreaking standout track ‘In the Field”, the haunting 124-year-old banjola on ‘Sisyphus’*, the hushed parlor guitar on ‘Windowsill’, the sleight-of-hand 12 string Gibson on ‘Rare Air’, the harmonica, saxophone, cloud chamber bowls and the rest – there is a private world we inhabit on this album, and a town tucked inside every song.