Vaughn Hemingway - The Children Of Holden (Radiowave CD Entertainment)
Vaughn Hemingway may just be a one-off. I've certainly never heard anything quite like this before. The Children Of Holden is genuine old-school progressive rock I started listening to when my cooking experiment began. Sci-fi lyrics and spacey, extended interludes, all created with a DIY aesthetic, on an old Fairlight, various antique synths, homemade instruments and a hairbrush colliding with electric guitar strings. Punk rock for the urban spaceman, Emerson, Meek and Palmer or Utopia fronted by Heath Robinson, and recorded in a garage. There are no easy answers, but who cares when the questions are so rarely asked.

I know almost nothing about Hemingway, except that he's made something quite unique. An album that is impossible to pigeonhole. There's no box to put this record in, no neat two-word genre that'll get anywhere close to summing up what's happening here. In lesser hands I might have found myself head in hands, rocking slowly back and forward, muttering quietly and weeping like a Spanish Madonna from the pages of Fortean Times. Instead I'm transported to inner / outer space, on a journey of unnatural discovery, via routes previously untraveled. If this is outsider music, I'm not sure I want to come back in. I can only suggest you get over to Hemingway's MySpace page and find out for yourself. Make sure you're sitting down.

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