Kanda Teenage Honey is the new and very varied new album by Brighton based Nick Hudson, recorded in an abandoned TV Studio in Tbilisi Georgia with local musicians and special guests including Toby Driver who also Mixed the album, Stuart Braithwaite, Vsevolod Usupov, Stuart Dahlquist, Alfreda Benge, Beqa Minadze, Lizzy Carey, Gigi Koberidze et al.
The album opens elegiacally with Khevsureti a modern classical prologue of immense minimalist beauty, imbued with the sadness of world events, as hopefully the war won't reach Georgia this time, this remembers heroes of battles past, while celebrating the fact that the album was recorded in Tbilisi Georgia in an old TV Studio.
For My Silence is a list of grievances that may have led to the request for silence, as we find out what may have scared him as a child, why he doesn't have tattoos, as they would be inappropriate for a gentle musician like Nick.
Sky Burial While Alive sets a disturbing poem about dictators to an ambient synth backing, that unsettles almost as much as the poem read by Alifib does, the dark percussion rises against the violins, they look aghast at the 7 Griffin Vultures deadly behaviour.
Hollow Man has choral voices set against an insistent guitar line intro that allows the stark piano part to have more effect as Nick sings about getting a Molotov for the oligarchs daughter. The chants of Kill Kill your church is in hell Nuremburg is stark succinct observation of the shameful state of the world.
This Heat sounds nothing like the legendary band of that name, being a piano ballad with interesting imagery as they drive to the moon among other things.
Hachiko is an acapella lullaby full of exquisite sadness. Archipelago is a tale of taking drugs and al fresco sex, Nick tells the story of his first lover who died at only 26 years old, the bleak sadness of young loss, the grief that never leaves.
Hunters is downbeat piano ballad with choral backing vocals that hopes to jump the shark.
Bardo has the feel of an Edgar Allen Poe story set to music, as the long tones fade in after the initial lines of poetry, before the drums crash in and it becomes a furious tsunami of sound, for that poem to unfold within clattering noise and distress for the dead, as it all falls away to sparse drums and piano the dread of modern times peaks through the gloom, before the bingo masters breakout freakout destroy the monsters conclusion.
Unspent Youth has operatic vocals leading into a spoken word passage and synth intrusions followed by strings alternating like fractal images.
Seva sounds a lot like something from Richard Pinhas Iceland album, as ambient waves with treated animal voices, lead towards the Georgian narrators tale.
In Praise Of Venerable Jorge that almost re-works Leonard Cohens Hallelujah into a slow careful rumination over the sparing piano.
Catherine In the Curates Garden is imbibing the Mandragora
hallucinating, hoping not to die, this has a medieval feel over the ambient hand drums.
Ortolan has the feel of a hymnal with choral vocals over the gentle classically influenced piano, even if the lyrics aren't at all religious.
Bad Ghost V Good Boy has a sorrowful feel with sparse acoustic guitar accentuating the questions in the lyrics.
The album closes with Danube Blues that takes us on a minimal cruise through the gorges and cities the Danube weaves its way through, all the torture and sorrow that has happened on its banks. As he shakes hands with St Stephen with his reliquary in the cathedral in Budapest.
Find out more at https://nickhudsonindustries.bandcamp.com/album/kanda-teenage-honey https://www.facebook.com/nick.hudson.718
