KC Rules OK

Kïng Creosote

In a small coastal village in Fife there exists a man called Kenny Anderson, photographs of him consist entirely of beard, yet he has taken Fife and put it on the map musically with the Fence Collective; a ragtag bag of musical anarchists and desperado's, or highly talented individuals producing mouthwateringly good tunes, depending on how you look at it.

Kenny is King Creosote and has produced over 20 albums, mostly in a lo-fi CD-R mailorder kind of way since 1994. KC Rules OK is his latest commercial release. I'd go as far as saying he's one of the best songwriters in the UK at the moment, capable of creating deceptively simple songs that are as deep as an ocean once you lend even half an ear to them, emotional, sad, uplifting but never drifting in to sentimentality or pretentiousness.

Backed by Manchester band the Earlies the songs are impeccably arranged and , despite my earlier comment, not lo-fi, horns, fiddle, strings and beats flesh out the atmosphere of the lyrics. An Immediately accessible album yet all the songs prove to be slow burners that release their warmth as you listen more. An album that immediately feels like an old friend. His main strength is as a wordsmith, lyrics that consistently carry an emotive punch that the likes of James Blunt or Daniel Powter just wouldn't get near. Dare I say he sums up the human condition whilst laughing in the face of it's unfatomableness (new word of the day, I think I might be turning into an American word mangler).

So how'd you describe the sound then? well think of a celtic badly drawn boy that can write really good songs with a folky twang, augmented by a mainly acoustic backing with a strong beat... actually that doesn't do it justice at all, listen to it on iTunes or myspace to get the gist

Iain Hazlewood