Ben Reynolds' 2009 album for Tompkins Square again shows his quietly elegant skill on acoustic guitar. With the lovely "Skylark" starting things with, essentially, a perfect pop hook -- it's one of the most immediately catchy numbers
Reynolds has yet recorded, building to a soft but strong conclusion --
How Day Earnt Its Night maintains a necessary balancing act between the familiar and the quietly exploratory. If he does not completely give himself over to the full kind of agog rapture that his countryman James Bradshaw does, it's his skill in the vein of someone like
Bert Jansch that always comes to the fore. Hearing the pleasant touch of "Risen" also calls to mind someone like
John Fahey at his most straightforward, as on the Christmas albums -- it's immediate, familiar, and warm rather than a bold challenge to expectations -- while the wheezing harmonica on "All Gone Wrong Blues" is a nice little exploration in a standard form. A subtle sense of drama gets aired at points -- the sudden pauses and extended notes on "The Virgin Knows" is a good example, while the mournful progression of "England" suggests a land that's been lost somewhere in the mists, and perhaps not happily. There's one full sequence of exploration that deserves note, though: the three-part title track, portraying the cycle of a day in sometimes ominous terms (thus the first part's title, "Dawn Hurt") and with an air of nervous, plucked tension that never fully disappears even as the song moves toward its steady conclusion on the last swirl of a quick, rhythmic melody. Good humor also crops up as well -- why else give the name "Death Sings" to an easygoing ramble of a performance? ~ Ned Raggett