299

The spokes catch the moonlight. Behind you, there’s nothing but a city you don’t know. Out in front, spreading out on either side of the inky blacktop, is the desert and the promise of a horizon. Here you’ll find the music of the 299. Out here, things get weird at the edges of the frame. Out here, you can lose your mind before finding it again. That’s what happened to Welsh multi-instrumentalist and producer Gavin Fitzjohn a couple of years ago. Making his way across the US - from Phoenix to Houston to Dallas to Tampa, out to New Orleans and way out in Joshua Tree - he sought the heart of the American troubadour: guitar for hire, and trouble just around the next bend.

The overarching sense of Lynchian weirdness is offset by songs that ring with crisp melodies and compositional nous. Blue Island’s skipping groove is intoxicating, dangerous in its allure, while elsewhere there are flecks of ‘60s vocal groups and Tom Waits-style melancholia tied up in Fitzjohn’s deliberate American drawl. Since completing work on these tracks, Fitzjohn has continued to work as a musician and producer with artists including Paolo Nutini, Manic Street Preachers, Gruff Rhys, Stereophonics and more, but the 299 keeps calling out to him. The songs are always playing somewhere in the background; a product of a time and place that says something about him as a songwriter and something else about America as an intoxicating landscape that will destroy you if you let it.

- Huw Baines