Album Review: Jamie Hutchings - Bedsit

It's been seven years since the last solo album from Jamie Hutchings. In the interim, he's busied himself with two noisy rock records with Infinity Broke and the wonderful Down The Unmarked Road, the result of his collaboration with Peter Fenton of Crow. Now he returns to the solitude of the self with the intimate, graceful and poetic Bedsit.

This is a sparser and more delicate set of songs than those on his previous solo album Avalon Cassettes. They feel weightless, unconcerned with time and the restraints of conventional song structure. There is a fragmentary and fragile quality to the music with guitars pulling in and out of focus, with gentle augmentation from strings, harmonica and the emotive piano of his sister Sophie Hutchings on Above The Rain and Shadow On The Lung. For the most part this is Hutchings, his vignettes and song-poems. Opener Second Winter details a dream of waking up with blocks of ice as feet and the resulting surreal happenings. A highlight is December Park, propelled by light flurries of guitar strings, upright bass and Hutchings' voice sounding weary like a hazy, late-night afterthought.

References to dreams, seasons and nature abound, framing existential questions and the foibles of human relationships. Centennial Park and Marrickville get name-checked and it feels very much like a Sydney album, albeit a reflective, introspective and intensely personal one from the melancholic side of town.