Album Review: Ed Kuepper - Second Winter

Brisbane icon Ed Kuepper is lauded loudly and often for his role in his iconic former outfits The Saints and Laughing Clowns – even his recent induction into The Bad Seeds was seen as cause for celebration – but sometimes you get the impression that these achievements, while impressive, tend to overshadow the stately solo career that he's been undertaking for more than a quarter of a century. Kuepper has amassed an incredibly rich and diverse catalogue under his own name, and is now adding to that with this long-player, Second Winter.

The new collection finds Kuepper and long-time drumming cohort Mark Dawson working together once more, and revisiting the first two albums of Kuepper's solo career, 1985's Electrical Storm (which provides the bulk of the tracks) and the following year's Rooms Of The Magnificent. These stripped-back reinterpretations are stunning in their gentle complexity, the bare bones of the music augmented by subtle washes of texture courtesy of strings and ambient field recordings. Engineer and co-producer Julian Knowles has done a wonderful job and more than held up his end of the bargain, but at the end of the day it's the songs that make this so special: the haunting majesty of Told Myself, beautiful re-readings of favourites Car Headlights and Electrical Storm, the welcome change of tempo provided by Palace Of Sin and the intricate intensity of Master Of 2 Servants all highlights of this intimate collection.

Kuepper's voice is in fine fettle, soothing and expressive and that, combined with the strong songcraft and powerful musicianship from all involved, makes Second Winter a fabulous addition to an already classic canon. One of Brisbane's finest delivers again.