Half Cousin

Kevin Cormack and Jimmy Hogarth’s initial tries at music-making had been apparently designed to circumvent the over-bearing effect that bands such as for example Deep Crimson, Rainbow and Iron Maiden experienced had on the fellow inhabitants from the Orkneys Islands in Scotland. Rather, the duo (consequently augmented by two users of Joe Strummer’s Mescelaros, for live happenings) forged ‘brief melodic tunes from rubbish’, decorating acoustic guitar and piano parts with recycled and discarded items and instruments, a listing that evidently included coat-hangers, bike horns and a bin. As befits their house location, eight kilometers or so from the Scottish coastline in the North Ocean, Half Cousin audio windswept and ramshackle, their carefully plucked guitars, wheezing accordions, dilapidated blowing wind instruments and damaged percussion sounding as though elegiac towards the historic standing rocks that decorate their isle and the previous shipwrecks that litter its coastline series (or as iDJ newspaper surmised, much less poetically, ‘like a one guy band falling in the stairs using a little bit of radio disturbance in the history’). The duo’s music attracts evaluation with compatriots like the Beta Music group, the Fence Collective and Mull Traditional Society aswell as famous brands Tom Waits. ‘Mrs Pilling’, a semi-spoken phrase tale in regards to a girl who befriends a ‘pig guy’ included on the 2004 debut The Function Area, was notably motivated by Janet Body’s autobiography An Angel WITHIN MY Table.