Roots guitar music is rarely as evocative as on Tom Rodwell’s album Wood & Waste.
An album that moves easily between minimalist rock structures and improvisatory, darkly sensual grooves that betray influences from the Caribbean and African music (especially on the scandalously funky She Got Me Boiling), as well as the low-brow guilty pleasures of doo-wop and garage rock.
It's a secret language of guitar music - vivid, propulsive and uncommon, not the usual histrionics of blues-related music.
Similarly, on-stage his shows are gothically witty, sprawling affairs, playing fast and loose with traditional forms and sensibilities, regularly featuring sacrilegious dives into a greasy barrel of calypso, roots and gospel obscurities.

less