If you spend the evening with a bottle of whisky instead of your sweetheart, the tune you bellow out in the wee hours - with arms 'round a snake oil merchant and a boxing ballerina - could well be a ditty from the mind of Al Duvall. Al's wicked vaudevillian hits are crafted on banjo, kazoo, and various percussive detritus. These 'gentle but deadly' songs are drawn from the working-class music of pre-war America, blending jug-band, medicine show, music-hall, and Victorian parlor ballads. Al delivers a loving backhand to the fringe dweller in this expertly crafted collection of aural ephemera. With an overdose of morbid puns and sly innuendo, 'Recluses Unite' is the perfect primer for any aspiring vagrant.
| ALBUM PREVIEW |
| TRACKLISTING |
01 Where The Comet Falls 4:07
02 Bareknuckle Ballerina 3:07
03 O! Anomia 3:13
04 The Gals In The Chorus 3:02
05 Slick Hamtree 3:20
06 Penny For Your Thoughts 3:33
07 Handsome Pete's Last Ride 3:18
08 Dark Inside 2:50
09 Me, Myself & You 2:40
10 Admiral Of The Narrow Seas 3:17
11 The Statue Of Virtue 2:53
12 Welfare Island 2:59
13 The Wreck Of The General Slocum 4:12
14 I Married A Milliner 2:25
15 (We're) The Marathon Dance Band 2:26
16 Poor Carrie Anne 2:18
17 The Busker 2:33
18 Skowhegan 2:25
| ALSO AVAILABLE from Al Duvall |
| REVIEWS |
| SOUND PROJECTOR |
"Al Duvall’s Recluses Unite…appears to be an attempt at a Tiny Tim revival, as Brooklyn-based songster Duvall picks up his banjo and sings 17 songs which are freakish pastiches of Edwardian, Music-Hall and early country songs (the sort of material for which Tiny Tim had genuine affection, and he included a vast cache of near-forgotten material in his repertoire). Even the CD label is printed to look like an old 78 disc. Al Duvall’s variant on these genres is to add a slightly more salacious and disreputable streak to these songs with his inventively twisted black-comedy lyrics, throwing in dirty punchlines and shades of modern depravity that our Edwardian ancestors would have blanched at. There’s also however an equally strong streak of utter weirdness and lowbrow surrealism, not too far away from the malarkey of Charles Gocher or Revd Fred Lane. When delivered in Duvall’s deadpan singing voice, this tends to leave a very odd taste in the mouth." - Ed Pinsent
| RADIO FREE |
"Part vaudeville rapscallion, part historical satirist, part straw-suited banjo minstrel, and very possibly one of the most engaging songwriters of recent years, Al Duvall is a bona-fide treasure. In a vintage-music setting, his painfully funny (sometimes painfully sad) and deceptively catchy songs draw on 1930's jug band music, folk-song, sea shanties, ragtime and olde English music-hall... and his laugh-out-loud lyrics -- which address topics as disparate as mermaids, shoemakers, sexual reassignment, kleptomania, bare-knuckle ballerinas, foot fetishes, raw capitalism and that olde chestnut, unrequited love -- will quietly blow your mind. He has just released his six-and-a-halfth album "Recluses Unite!" on the legendary Australian label Dualplover (Deerhoof, Justice Yeldham, Toxic Lipstick amongst many, many others)." - RADIO FREE