My enduring image of George Wilding is as an acoustic troubadour, a minstrel garbed in gypsy-like sartorial elegance wielding an acoustic guitar with the sort of lyrics that turn even the most everyday encounters and observations into an eloquent mix of romantic poetry and tragi-comic reality, chivalric tales of unrequited love and modern recollections of getting drunk, getting high, getting confused, of getting everything but the girl.
His new one, “Shoot Me,” however, paints him, musically at least, in a new light. Drop the needle on this one, and big, shimmering, and crashing guitars burst out of the speakers. Coiled jangles of Byrdsian bliss sally forth in a sort of pre-Brit pop, post-baggy indie-pop vibe.
And it’s not just big; as always, it’s clever, too. The music might now echo with a sound that ricochets between the likes of The Las, later Aztec Camera, and The Go-Betweens at their most accessible, but the lyrics are as smart and sassy as ever.
I always find the character he plays in his songs, that of life’s love-lorn loser (something at odds with his real-life charm and affability), an enduring image. It follows in the footsteps of the medieval minstrel singing for his supper, the Renaissance poet bleeding words on his parchment in a rented hovel, and the tortured modern playwright in their attic room struggling for a break and suffering for their art. Though, of course, there is always something of ourselves found in our art!
A new song? Yes. A big song? Absolutely. A new string to his sonic bow? Perhaps. A typically great song? And then some.
