Chris Wood's latest album is released on 1 July 2013 and available to pre-order now.
He's done it again - proving to be one of best contemporary songwriters around at the current time - these times of austerity seemed made for Chris Wood's ascerbic and telling commentary.
This is a masterpiece and stands alongside his previous Handmade Life as a truly great album. The title track is already a major contender for original song of the year.
Award winning English songwriter Chris Wood returns with his incredible new album 'None The Wiser'. Featuring songs first aired live (with his band) on BBC Radio 2. "This album began two years ago with a guitar - then an amp. Then I got a call from Hamish Stewart to come and sing a couple of my songs with him and some local funk soul brothers in a ten piece festival band. Then I became infatuated with the sound of the Hammond Organ and finally decided, for the first time, to add a string Bass. It has been all about the sound, what we might play was never really decided. While this musical journey was going on, Britain was sinking deeper into recession. From radio and television studios our political and fiscal masters were insisting we should continue to listen to them, to take seriously their initiatives and their projections while out in the streets our personal experience was, and remains, in gritty contradiction to their rhetoric. I believe we are on our own. I believe all we really have is ourselves and what we make, and, the most precious of what we make lies in our connection to each other. They have not found a way of taxing what flows between us and our loved ones." - Chris Wood March 2013.
The Guardian - 4 Star Review 4 July 2013
Chris Wood is one of Britain's most uncompromising and original singer-songwriters, but his latest album is remarkable for the settings as much as the lyrics. The most celebrated member of the English Acoustic Collective has always been keen to experiment – as he proved with his folk-rap collaborations with Dizraeli – but he now plays amplified guitar and has become " infatuated" with the Hammond organ, which appears here along with bass, flugelhorn and piano. The mood remains as sombre as ever, with Wood's bleak, detailed observations of English life, political stupidity or his own uncertainties lightened just occasionally by stories of love and survival. With The Sweetness Game he even manages to combine political fury with a highly personal love song. Elsewhere, he provides one of his most pained, honest and intense songs to date with Thou Shalt, and a new, thoughtful and non-triumphal setting for Blake's Jerusalem. Robin Denselow - The Guardian
