Cakekitchen, The "Trouble Again In This Town" [Label Direct Color Vinyl]

On the heels of his stellar memoir Time Flowing Backwards, voted by Pitchfork as one of the 10 best music books of 2019, legendary New Zealand musician Graeme Jefferies' next chapter in sound -- Trouble Again in this Town -- is at last ready to go. This is Jefferies' first new Cakekitchen release in 4 years and the first domestic release in the USA in 9 years. The album continues the wayward path first exposed by his early Flying Nun solo album Messages for the Cakekitchen, but manages to cross the border of limitations imposed by old 1980s technology so that his familiar messages become something new altogether.

The album was recorded on a portable 16 track that Graeme transports from one end of the globe to the other. It retains touchstones to his past work but still sounds up to date and current at the same time. He utilizes fragments of TEAC 4 track "found sound" recordings to masterful effect and wedges original musical pieces into unexpected and interesting places. The new material is reminiscent at times of his groundbreaking work with New Zealand pioneers This Kind of Punishment.

Graeme plays all the instruments on the release (guitar, piano, viola, cello, drums, bass) and recorded all the songs over a period of years in various houses and hallways in New Zealand, Germany and Australia. His meticulous "take as long as it takes" approach to making records ensures a very wide pallet of sound. A rainbow of colors can be heard in his music, and although the material was initially conceived on either guitar or piano, by the time he has completed a recording, the arrangement is usually pretty special-complex and unlike any other person's version of man at the microphone -- one with no deadline and all the time in the world.