Vieilles Caniques et Nouvelles Caniques

Indie-folk is often terrible: a ham-fisted, middle-of-the-road mush of xylophones and ukuleles that is unashamedly twee and contrivedly cute. Thankfully, this album from Stanley Brinks is a cut above, with a wryness, honesty and acerbity to its lyrics, and some old-time American grit to the music.

Brinks is nothing if not prolific. Since the end of Herman Dune, the band he fronted in the early 2000s, he has released a stream of DIY-sounding singer-songwriter albums. Here he has teamed up with the Old-Time Kaniks – two members of a Norwegian folk collective – who provide simple banjo and fiddle backing for his wistful songs of love, loss, regret and itinerant lifestyle. His reedy, unpretentious voice has a Bob Dylan-ish slur to it on ‘You Break My Heart’, while the unvarnished fiddle sounds warm and intimate on ‘Monique’ – one of many songs that sound like round-the-campfire singalongs. Somehow Brinks manages to make predictable rhymes and near-clichés sound refreshingly honest and comforting –no mean feat. However, there are 26 songs on this double-CD and Brinks’ charms wear a little thin: the initial plan of releasing this as two separate albums was probably a good one.