Album Review: David Hedderman, Pulling At The Briars

Disbanding less than a year after releasing their debut album, the Choice-nominated In Towers & Clouds, The Immediate are one of Ireland’s great lost bands. Almost two decades later, David Hedderman releases his superb debut album with fellow Immediate alumnus and close friend, Conor O’Brien (Villagers), in the production chair.

Hedderman has been busy over the ensuing years, cultivating an impressive career as a visual artist in his adopted city of Berlin. Still, he also continued to write songs, and the result is a cracking debut. ‘Fairytale’ swirls into life on a psychedelic-jazz swoon, possessing the sensation of a winding road well trod for Hedderman.

Elsewhere, on ‘I Heard You Calling’ and lead single ‘Blue Jeans’, he channels Gram Parsons, which can only ever be a goddamn beautiful thing. The latter presents fine flourishes of soft percussion, pedal steel and fiddle, which tremendously shadow beautiful guitar melodies across the entire record. ‘Permanent Blush’ and ‘Pokerface’ both spark with a fine alt-country groove, reminiscent of a Kevin Morby approach to folk, but splendidly blended with Lemon Twigs-style baroque pop.

Instrumental ‘In Your Own Way’, meanwhile, is another gem. Hedderman started writing the tune when he left Dublin for Berlin, regularly altering it over the past 16 years, and presents it here as a palimpsest of his life experience.

8/10