Four years on from The Mileage Made, South Wales-based Tim Manning returns with his sixth Americana-veined album, working in a four piece format with Jem Ponsford on drums, bassist Stuart Loosemore with co-producer Mike Hopkins variously on mandolin, Appalachian dulcimer and keys. Flashbacks And Polaroids opens with the loose-limbed New Orleans meets Slim Chance swagger of ‘Carousel Of Postcards’, a wry musing on the array of usually tacky postcards with views of the town and snow globes that souvenir stores stock to tempt the visiting tourists that, wondering “is that the best they could do” expands into reflecting the question back at yourself (“Your intention was to write down/Your thoughts and your feelings in no uncertain terms/Using words like heartbreak, anger and betrayal/Put it in the mailbox, send it on its way/But stood amongst the souvenirs as the snowflakes settle you realise/You can’t move forwards if you’re constantly looking back/Over your shoulder at a life that didn’t work and you think to yourself was that the best I could do”).
A similar downbeat note’s to be found on the chugging ‘Hollow Promises’ (“You tell yourself there’s the promise of a new day as the sun goes down/But deep inside you know your fight has gone and the war is lost”), with its self-accusatory “You hide the truth behind pride that comes before a fall/That will hurt you and the ones you love/But there’s no way out, you’ve searched for a way/You’ve tried everything and each time you’ve failed/The only thing left for you to do is to hope and pray for a little light to shine on you…before you reach breaking point”.
Taken at a slower alt country pace but with the same frame of mind, ‘Time Doesn’t Always Heal’ unfolds a broken marriage (“Two months ago your wife went to visit family/She said she needed time and space to breath/A week became a month, a month became two/I guess the break she needed was really from you”) as the narrator finally opens the letter containing the dreaded words “I’m sorry but I don’t love you anymore”.
Ringing guitars and Cash-like rhythm drive ‘The Moral Higher Ground’, a cautionary tale of trying to play the peacemaker “arms outstretched holding two strangers apart… The smell of bloodlust mixed with the alcohol/They don’t know or care who they should be rooting for” and winding up the one the cops arrest (“A girlfriend screams and jumps on your back/Riding you around like a steer in the midnight rodeo…A car door slams and the boots come running/They see you holding two men down on the floor/A woman on you back and a crowd baying for more…Seeing a scapegoat fingers are pointed at you”) while the two men “help each other up like best buddies do”.
The guitars twang on ‘Midday’ which, sounding like Gordon Lightfoot holed up in Austin with harmony refrain back-ups, is a lonesome highway number lying in a cheap motel wondering where your life went when “everything you own fits in the trunk of a car/Everything you need can be found inside of any bar” and thinking back to your father teaching you to play guitar and your mother singing Patsy Cline.
As the title suggests, ‘Flashbacks And Polaroids’ is another reflection on failed relationships as the narrator recounts two doomed marriages, wife one too fond of the bottle, wife two a seven day Las Vegas chapel wonder, but still rushing in to make the same mistakes (“I stop for gas on the ride home…pay for the fuel and a coffee to go/She says why not wait it out it’s really coming down/I could use the company time goes slow…I introduce myself she smiles and tells me her name/What could possibly go wrong”).
Given all the hard luck stories, it’s little surprise when the country scurrying ‘Trials And Tribulations’ opens with him singing “Sometimes you wonder what it would be like/To disappear and start a new life/One free from disappointment and tragedy…. To fake your own death in a blazing fire… Change the way you look and no one could say that doesn’t suit you”. Naturally, given the album’s half empty perspective, you just get to “realise that your new life/Ended up the same as your old one used to be/Full of all the disappointments that made you start again”.
A slow walking rhythm, ‘The Standing Dead’ is another everything turns to shit song where the initial spark that lights “a flame that lasts a lifetime/A flame that burns like a beacon in your heart/A flame that burns long after death do one of you part” can, if your eye wanders, also “destroy everything you have in the blink of a crying eye/If you let it ignite for a second time leaving just “The smouldering stumps known as the standing dead/The scorched earth, the smoke filled skies/The charred remains of the fire of desire/That rages and burns out of control”.
The album’s most rocking track, ‘Nomadic Life’ again turns to life on the road (“Always on the move never putting roots down/You don’t need much to get by/A tank of gas to keep things rolling and some fuel… for your body and your mind”), a love song to singer’s truck (“What’s now your home once carried cattle to the abattoir/You bought it on the same day Levon Helm passed/As you drove it away the DJ played The Band’s Ophelia and you knew, knew right then she had a name”), fixed up with a “bunk out of old church pews” and a “wood burning stove/So you could eat and stay warm when the winter months came along”. And when they ask where you’re headed “You say I’ll know when I get there if I don’t then I guess I’ll drive in through”.
While that may be about having no ties, there’s always memories that hold you to the past, providing the mortality theme for the jerky guitar notes and mid-tempo rhythm of the Steve Earle cum Michael McDermott shaded ‘Graves Of The Unknown’ with its images of how
“The recently bereaved tend the graves of those they’ve lost/Once a week at first then birthdays, maybe Christmas time…then the next generation tend the graves of those they’ve lost” as “Inside the cemetery gates/Rows of headstones names and dates/Carved in granite side by side/When they were born and when they died”, reflecting on the cycle that “There’s a natural order to life from a seed a tree can grow/Reaching for the sky from the graves of the unknown”.
It ends with the near six-minute, slow-chimed guitars of the emotionally aching, stripped back and slow building ‘Gravity’s Pull’ and the bitter acknowledgement that sometimes “things can never ever go back to the way they were” and “saying sorry doesn’t count for much or the offer to retract the words chosen” and that “ there’s a world of difference between/Things said in the heat of the moment, things said to win an argument, things said that neither of you really mean/And the cold hearted cruel emotionless words” that draw a line in the sand and leave “scars upon the shore”.
In many ways Manning’s own (if not necessarily autobiographical) Blood On The Tracks, Flashbacks And Polaroids is not exactly the most upbeat album you’ll hear this year, but it may well be one of the best.
Mike Davies
Artists’ website; www.blindriverscare.co.uk
This is the most recent Blind River Scare video we can find. ‘Driving The Coastline’ – live:
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