Gerry Mitchell is a Scottish poet who makes Irvine Welsh sound like a verbose Romantic. Various Production are the UK’s hottest remix team. This is not your usual poetry album.
The album is dominated by Mitchell’s evocative and vitriolic verse. Only on three tracks do music and poetry truly gel and produce something bigger than the sum of its parts. For most of the album, Various provide folky film music that plays second fiddle to Mitchell’s gnarly voice.
Mitchell comes across like a more virulent, more pared down version of ‘Trainspotting’ author Irvine Welsh. Mitchell’s themes focus largely on disenchanted and underpriviledged circles where ‘No Future’ is the order of the day: Violence, racism, alcoholism and substance abuse feature heavily. Mitchell is a keen observer with a hawkish eye for detail.
If you read Welsh’s 2006 novel ‘The Bedroom Secrets Of The Master Chefs’ then you remember the vivid description of the lure a boozy pub has on the protagonist, who slips slowly into alcoholism. Yep, many of Mitchell’s 17 pieces here are as successful as that in calling up this atmosphere.
Various Production, meanwhile, produce a sympathetic soundtrack full of dark freak folk, Krautrock and Italian slasher movie soundtracks from the 70’s. An eerie accordion lends ominous touches to the proceedings. The folky elements are a first for Various and it seems they listened long and hard to Portishead’s 2008 comeback album ‘Third’ when they put these tracks together.
The music on tracks like ‘Semi-Important Parasites’ would make a great new soundtrack for Scottish cult horror movie ‘The Wicker Man’ (1973). But when coupled with Mitchell’s recitals the music takes a backseat. It’s clearly ‘Mitchell 1: Various 0′ at this stage.
Halfway into the album, Various flex their muscle and start messing with Mitchell’s recorded recitals, cutting up, stretching and repeating phrases. On ‘All Fall Down’ the rhythm of Mitchell’s recital finally clicks into the groove laid down by the ultra deep bass and drums.
On ‘Robot Dialogue’, Mitchell’s reading of the piece is deconstructed and the music messes with the spoken word leaving the listener disoriented. Nice one, but Various top this performance on ‘Idiot Box’, the pinnacle of this trilogy of tracks.
Various Production take Mitchell’s recital of ‘Idiot Box’ and cut it up into phrases and single words before re-assembling the words around some Atari 8-bit noises that sound like a games arcade in total meltdown chaos. ‘Idiot Box’ is the closest this album comes to the creative and disturbing tapes hipster poets Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs created in the 1950’s.
These three tracks alone make it worth your while checking out ‘The Invisible Lodger’. But there is much more to discover, like the grim realism of ‘English Estate’ or the Krautrock rhythms of ‘The Unwritten Book’.
This album is worth a punt: A bit frosty at first, ‘The Invisible Lodger’ may yet thaw out after a couple of listens and become a staple in your playlists for a long time.
We say: 
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