Nick Waterhouse – Fooler – CD

The title of the sixth album from Californian singer-songwriter Nick Waterhouse is more than just the name of one of its tracks. The Fooler is the new album by Nick Waterhouse, and it’s a lot. Recorded by Mark Neill (Black Keys; Los Straightjackets; Dave Cobb) in Valdosta, Georgia, it’s a song-cycle of sorts, the arc of the album telling a tale of a city and its denizens. The result is a record that offers up new riches and fresh perspectives with every spin. From the hidden corners of ‘Hide & Seek’ and the roadhouse soul of ‘Play To Win’ to the primitive, attitudinal, chugging two-chord thrill of ‘Late In The Garden’, it builds inexorably to the drama of the title track and pulsing roll-and-rock of the final pay off, ‘Unreal, Immaterial’. Play it once and it sounds immediately like a collection of great songs. Play it again – and you will – and it feels like a novel or film slowly unveiling its secrets, kaleidoscopic in its narrative complexity. “Especially during this record, I started just becoming what Allen Ginsberg called a pure breath,” says the artist. “I was becoming pure breath with my ideas.”

1. Looking For a Place
2. Hide and Seek
3. (No) Commitment
4. Play To Win
5. Was It You
6. Late In the Garden
7. The Problem With a Street
8. Plan For Leaving
9. Are You Hurting
10. It Was the Style
11. The Fooler
12. Unreal, Immaterial