MICHAEL TOMLINSON is the main man in the sorta-solo project MF Tomlinson, in which he plys a very neat line in indie folk/roots songcraft with a grainy bearhug of a voice.
Australian by birth but based in London, Michael is about to release a six-track album, the rather lovely Strange Time.
Quickly following his debut EP, Last Days Of Rome, Strange Time was written slap-bang in the middle of 2020; Tomlinson, in lockdown purdah with a home studio; the songs began to flow.
A month or more back we properly loved his last single, “Them Apples”, a song of which we said: “Are you, like me, getting a little of the dulcet and grandiose vocal delivery of the artist known at birth as Scott Engel, here and there, in a song with guitars glimmering and finally letting it all hang out in acid-rock soloing; periods of unbridled cackling, recalling the dark witch-folk of Comus; lyrically reaching out in a time of isolation and intensity (“Why won’t you talk to me, tell me everything?”).
Today he’s dropped a final taster for that album, the Bleecker Street-meets-acid balladry of “A Long Day”, a meditation on his dawns rising to travel to the East London bakery at which he works – the kinda shift that puts you askance with the world, as he tells in his lyrics: “At the end of a long day / It’s just gone lunch,” his voice a warming a reassuring, cracked timbre over which Ami Koda’s flute trills and flows and brings the psych in free flight.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we are all of us in the bakery, but some of us are looking at the stars; as evidenced by such a lovely tale of the everyday rendered wondrous with melodic uplift.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we are all of us in the bakery, but some of us are looking at the stars; as evidenced by such a lovely tale of the everyday rendered wondrous with melodic uplift.
As Micheal says: “These songs are meant to be understood, they’re not meant to be mysteries … they are meant to speak from my heart and soul to yours.”
MF Tomlinson’s Strange Time will be released digitally and in a numbered vinyl pressing of 150 on April 9th; gather together your pounds, shillings and pence, because the shopkeeper is taking orders over at Bandcamp now.
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