By Dr Tim Themi:
Fresh from a solid live-to-air on 3CR, local guitar-artist Nicholas Ogburn launched his new album – a fifth – with great aplomb last Friday night at the Acoustic Café in Collingwood.
Surrounded by vintage guitars for sale, mounted on the walls – and ably supported by the beautiful vocal-piano sounds of Sarah Giufre, who opened up proceedings – Ogburn traced the songs spanning his decade-long recording career and showcased the unique, touch-sensitive melodic timings that all his listeners have come to adore.
The introductory soliloquies were, as always, a great feature of the performance: offering cryptic clues as to what, originally, may have stirred him to the heights that each song demanded of his fingering hands as they structured-up and danced across the fretboard.
Switching between an acoustic and various forms of electric – from a Fender Strat and Tele to an amazing looking Flying V – Ogburn meted out the kind of delay-pedal ambiances that lovers of such albums as Neil Young’s Dead Man, Mick Turner’s Moth, and Papa M’s Live From A Shark Cage would also appreciate to the core.
I was fortunate enough many years ago to have Nicholas Ogburn share the bill when I was launching a third album of my own under the name “The Resonance” – and was very pleased, along with all in attendance, to see him again kicking-on to produce more great songs for all of us who have since been flung to various distant shores.
Nicholas Ogburn is consistently able to summon moments in the free-play of time-space and sound that make him, perhaps, equal to anyone who has ever endeavoured to combine rhythm and melody in complex guitar configurations. My new favourite song from the new album, Ilk Drift Vol. 2, is called “Wet Roads” for just such reasons – namely, a descending melody draped across a finger-picking waltz with just the amount of echo to evoke the beyond.
Time will tell whether it, or any other song, will ever displace from the throne the patient crescendo of “This is how it was always going to be” from his very first album of 1999.
Share on FacebookTim Themi is a PhD in Philosophy & Psychoanalysis from Deakin. He also holds honours degrees in Philosophy from La Trobe and the Engineering Sciences from Melbourne. Between 1998 and 2002 he launched 3 albums of original music and published numerous live reviews in Inpress magazine. He is also a committed activist at large and in the social media.
