Music

Sam Amidon

John Rogers | Sunday 5 September, 2010 21:17

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Moving to New York City to rebel against the folk music he and his family had played together since he was a toddler didn’t really work out for Sam Amidon. While he’d intended to get into indie rock and free jazz, he found that the hipster kids were all playing the same American folk songs he’d been trying to leave behind. And what a rich vein of music to mine: murder ballads, tragic tales and love songs played and learned and passed on based solely on merit, with the best and most memorable surviving to the present day. Amidon puts his own spin on them of course, interspersing the tracks with surreal improvised stories and sometimes destroying delicate tracks with noisy jams, guitar solos and strange physical tics and dances, not unlike UK folk experimentalist David Thomas Broughton. His latest album and career high I See A Sign collects nine such standards and one beautiful reworking of a trite R. Kelly track, showing Amidon can turn his hand to other types of music too. It was apparently recorded in just two hours at the Greenhouse Studio in Iceland, with arrangements by the white-hot talents of Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurðsson providing a mouth-watering cherry on the cake.

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