No Time For Turning Back, their second album, fronted by songwriter Anderson and featuring Alan McKay on guitars, drummer Ian Barrie and bassist Rick Nickerson, alongside contributions from fiddler Kirsten Hendry, mandolin player Steve Davidson, Nick Hann on sax and Chris Thomson on keys, the Knopfleresque vocals, phrasing, guitar work, rhythms and melodies summon immediate thoughts of a Shetland sultans of swing.
Though the blurb tags them as contemporary rock, the folk undercurrents are never hard to discern, the album opening with the driving resilience-themed ‘Survivor’, the lyrics bringing Scottish dialect colour as he sings of being “happed up like a bairn”. The first to feature sax, with the rhythm noted in the title, ‘One More Twist Of The Knife (Crime Fiction Sala)’ sketches a noir murder yarn (“you can’t drive faster than the corpse in the boot”) where “there is no story more twisted than life”.
The first of two consecutive five minute numbers, again with sax and Grace Anderson adding vocals, the fluidly flowing rhythm and conversational, confessional delivery of ‘I Jump Up And Clap My Hands’ with the protagonist a climate change denier (“you tell me something about melting ice/and I say to you you’re telling lies”) with a blind faith in his own certainty (“I jump up and clap my hands/ I know where I’m going to land”), the song going on to talk about “people long ago” and the passing of the age of the buffalo (“all they found was bones white over the plains/all they’d known was gone and never came back again”), and while our wilfully blind narrator declares “I don’t want to understand”, as the song says “there’s no hiding what is true”.
It’s followed by the boogie chugging ‘I Could Dream A Highway’, an open top yellow lines cruising for healing number with some tasty electric guitar licks and its country flavours echoed in references to Hank Williams and the Great Plains. Bringing bluesy shades to bear and again with a dialect frame to the lyrics (“As I walked oot ae summer’s eve/aa doon to the Carlin wood/I thocht my sorrows an cares tae leave/let the bonny bairn play in the sun”, ‘The Carlin Wood’ basically a blissful reverie of a couple soaking up the sun while their kid frolics around.
McKay on nylon string guitar and Hann on sax, the rhythmically scampering ‘Been So Long In Babylon’, one of the most Knofpler-sounding cuts, is a protest song that again speaks of self-delusion in the face of the obvious (“I’ve bought the right to deceive myself/In a play by numbers game”) as we grow accustomed to the folly (“saw a wise man mocked by fools./saw a liar crowned as king”), injustices (“I saw a bairn forced to bear arms.an angel forced to sell her wings”) and duplicities (“they only ever tell you the truth/so you’ll believe them when they lie”) of society, and the apathy with which we accept them (“If I shrug my shoulders and accept/that I have nothing left to say/then I’ll sit down and before my TV set/and watch my life slip away”).
Featuring fiddle, mandolin and Italian Irene Balastrieri on grand piano, the staccato rhythm ‘I Turn My Face To The Sea’ is about opening your eyes and acting on what you see (“I have no time for lies/no time for trying to please”), here in walking away from a failed relationship (“I have to move on/The lease has come to an end/I am leaving at dawn/before you come back from your friend”).
Tipping the six-minute plus scales, the stand-out ‘Footsteps Make The Path’ opens with and features Steve Davidson on boha, the droning bagpipes native to the Gascony region of France, Grace Anderson echoing vocals with Douglas on a semi-spoken bardic grail quest narrative about “the mystery of love” and “a magic key to set us free/If we could only learn up from down”, and ultimately following your own road instead of “trying to steal a sip from an old fractured cup” and “trying to travel in other people’s dreams”.
Namechecking JJ Cale as another influence, though it’s still Knopfler who is the template, ‘A Wee Drop’ is not, as it might suggest about drinking, but about loss, the lyrics alluding to a suicide in motel room, but also referencing Glen Finnan, the site of the Jacobite rising in Lochaber, and the lone highlander immortalised on the monument at the head of the loch, “looking down upon a changed land he cannot see”. The context of the song is Scotland and the relationship with alcohol and emotional pain and the culture of not talking about feelings and using alcohol as self-medication with alcohol.
Again with grand piano and wailing sax solo play out, the slow-paced penultimate ‘The Slow Cold Of Leaving’ again speaks to loss (“sitting in the dawn/among the sad echoes/of people who are gone… a well with no bottom”) and how “even the warmth of a new face/cannot cut the slow cold of leaving”. It ends with the driving urgency and swing of the six-minute plus title track, back on the road for another excursion into quest territory, our driver picking up a female hitchhiker dreaming of getting to Tucson and a stopover at a small gas station where the old man tells him “this is nae the road to Tucson, Amarillo, Albuquerque or Santa Fe”, spelling out the message that “ye’re ne the first ta come here looking for answers/Seeking direction or even truth” and that the truth “where this road lead is up tae you”, as it end with “so I drove off towards the sunset/and all the other sunsets that lay beyond/each dawn brings a new day and nowhere to stay” but “there is no time for turning back”.
Not especially well-known beyond their local stomping grounds, No Time For Turning Back fully deserves to spread their name south of the border and beyond, but if not they could always have a lucrative career as a Dire Straits tribute.
Mike Davies
Artists’ website: https://www.facebook.com/thedonaldandersonband
‘I Jump Up And Clap My Hands’ – official video:
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