Tim Bragg - Beat Bones & Stone Angels (2016)

This album is an extension (and reworking) of the EP Beat Bones & Alchemy of which the following is a review:
If you like your music mellow, intelligent and just a little bit dark then you’ll find yourself pulled in by this collection of original tracks from Tim Bragg. His dexterous guitar, flute and drum work (he plays all the instruments on most of the tracks) show him to be not only a highly skilled multi-instrumentalist, but a musician with an enjoyably disobedient inventiveness. While he manages, overall to stay within the comfortably familiar framework of a blues, funk or swing influenced composition, he never slips into cliché. Having said that, Tim Bragg’s music is so broadly influenced, and so highly educated, that you are constantly expectant of the unexpected, and ever-so-slightly on edge – this is a musician who would quietly turn Folk into Jazz, or introduce Reggae underneath a soaring flute. The layering of both acoustic and digital sounds is beautifully complex and done with an enormous confidence which is both gripping and alluringly attractive.
The overall effect is the slight paranoia and disorientation of a very modern dream. With its honed, sharp lyrics and rule-breaking use of musical styles, this work puts me in mind of the New Journalism style of Tom Woolfe, where you become totally saturated in the detail of a single moment or thought. This isn’t detached background folksy sort of stuff, this is deeply descriptive and challenging. But you won’t get confused or lost in this music, Bragg’s skill and knowledge of his craft will steer you comfortably home in the end.
(On Beat Bones & Stone Angels Tim is joined by many other musicians and shares lead vocals on two of the tracks.)