Josh Preston – The Complex Wooden Heart EP
Free EP (download) (2008)
Listen while reading:
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Before I heard Josh Preston I thought I’m not so much into folk music coming from England. Ok, everybody knows classics like Ralph McTell or Nick Drake – but they never got me in the way folk music from overseas got me (note: I’m writing from Germany). I missed the spirit of the music – as strange as this possibly sounds (but I’m sure you know what I’m talking about).
Ok, so much to my prejudice. But, as so often in live, it was just a matter of missing experience. I found Josh Preston through Twitter and I saw that you could download his music for free from his website. So I thought I give it a try. And what I found was really a surprise to me. From the first notes I heard I loved the sound of this man.
I first listened to his current album Exit Sounds (2008). It wasn’t the music I hoped I would find, because I was looking for some acoustic folk – just a man and his guitar, you know. Don’t get me wrong: the man and his guitar were there, but they were not alone. Electronic Beats and sounds walked hand in hand with them. Ok, it was not what I was looking for, but it was so great. Long story short: I downloaded the rest of his music from his site and got lucky with all other releases.
This preface brings me to the EP I want to present to you. It’s called The Complex Wooden Heart EP and it got four songs – two from the above mentioned Exit Sounds record and two more from the Between Memory And Mortality album, released in 2006. The four songs are acoustic versions of the tracks – what is also the reason I picked this release to introduce to you.
Josh Preston comes along with a charismatic and, beneath all strength you can hear in the foreground of his singing, very fragile voice. The tracks are mostly dealing with sad topics and are a very good basis to present Preston’s singer-songwriter abilities. You find catchy, if you can say so in this context, melodies and empathetic guitar playing. After listening to those tracks they manifested themselves in your brain. Even if you are not humming them, you just need to hear one note of them and you know it is Josh Preston. I think this is what makes a great folk artist and singer-songwriter. And he definitively is one of them.
So don’t waste time and visit his page to grab some of his stuff. Also buy his CDs if you like them at Me And The Machine Records.
