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Fasten your seat belts, you’re on the road to hell. And by the way, save for the blues platform that’s right where any comparison to Chris Rea ends. ‘Full Auto Shut-off’ is a blues record in essence, but one so dark it’s less a midnight blue and more pitch black. Patrik Tanner leads us through several tiers of a very private hell, in which we hear him wrestle with an inner turmoil while searching for a theological resolution. You won’t catch anything resembling Rory Gallagher or The Stones here; this is a form of Gothic Blues owing more to Nick Cave and the more melancholic moments of Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’.

Tanner’s voice acquires several guises throughout, ranging from the Neil Young vocal treatments of ‘The Unseen’, to a despairing Iggy Pop wail for ‘Pale Blue Skies’ by way of the Tom Waits style storytelling of ‘Never Tell’. More than just a voice though, Tanner’s guitar work is ever present and always impressive. At times subtle and understated, there are moments when the playing becomes as incendiary as anything you’re likely to hear, with ‘Was a Dream’ providing the best examples. The track features a guitar duel such as might have been performed had the redneck kids from Deliverance discovered electricity and had another thirty years worth of hard knocks behind them, and ends with a post-rock wah-wahed barrage of ear-splitting intensity.

There are a few brief moments of light relief in the form of a playful glockenspiel dancing across the backdrop to ‘Never Tell’ and a cool-jazz solo during the title track. Besides that though, the album proceeds to drag us deeper and deeper into the pit. But wait! Just as we’re about to really start feeling the heat there’s a twist in the tail as final track, the aptly titled ‘UP’, leads us cheerfully back toward the surface with Tanner, seemingly having found an answer to all his problems, singing ‘I’m going up, up and away’.

Phew! Hold on to your hats though; there’s a secret track that provides a double bluff. Perhaps more fittingly, a ten-minute dark ambient drone (such as you might hear if you stuck your ear next to a hive full of a few thousand bees) finally draws the album to an unsettling close.

‘Full Auto Shut-off’ is a bleak journey but one that reveals Patrik Tanner to be a songwriter of extreme honesty as well as being a guitarist with a rare gift. We can only hope that the recording of this album provided the catharsis it seems he so badly needed. Now it’s our turn.

RICHARD STOKOE

After Ten Years the Faraway Men are Far Out!

Patrik Tanner and the Faraway Men have a new Album titled Full Auto Shut-Off. An intimate release party is planned for 25 May 2007 at Acadia Café in Minneapolis, MN. Special guests that evening will include Sam Keenan, Ali Gray and Rock the Cure.

It is clear from the progress of the group's last three albums that the group has been evolving away from country music.

So where have Patrik and the Men ended up with this latest album? I have no problem calling it either pop or rock. But whatever you want to call it, it's certainly not the pop or rock any of us grew up with.

With Full Auto Shut-Off, Patrik Tanner has taken pop music out of high school and has given it a contemporary intellect with a modern sensibility along with a hard jagged edge.

This music will blast through your facade and tear away your pretensions. One must have a strong heart, and a brilliant mind to withstand the challenge that this music presents. The weak and feeble minded should seek their music elsewhere.

We're lucky in the rock/pop music world that every few years there will be someone who can reinvent the way the whole thing looks, and sounds, and tastes, and vibrates, and makes you think. But in the end, they all make you feel the same way. They all make you feel like there is hope for the human race. For that I thank Patrik, and all the rockers who have gone before him.

Tim Null at www.befuddled.org