Lauren Auerbach & Bert Jansch - After The Long Night

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not Bert's best work

This is a welcome issue on CD of two albums which Auerbach, Jansch and a small band cut in the mid 80s. Only 1000 copies of each were pressed and it is good to have these rarities available. My guess is that you're interested in this because, like me, you admire Bert Jansch very much and that, like me, you'll want this in your collection whatever it's like, but I do have my reservations about it.

I find this album a slightly odd period piece - odd, because the songs and the vocal style seem to me to belong more to the late 60s or early 70s. The songs are largely penned by producer Richard Newman, and are generally pleasant, forgettable tunes of the generic type found on lots of albums by folky duos and groups in the 70s, with an accompaniment often sounding a bit like Fleetwood Mac's Oh Well, Part 2. The lyrics feature a lot of hackneyed "sorrow/tomorrow" sort of rhyming and have that familiar, almost meaningless pseudo-profundity in places: Days And Nights, for example contains the lines "The mountains make love/And an angel descends from Heaven above." There's a lot of this sort of thing, which I'd have loved when aged 17 and reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull, but it's hardly enduringly insightful.

Lauren Auerbach's vocals go very well with the lyrics. They are breathy and fragile, and multi-tracked to give them quite a haunting quality - again a style very popular in the early 70s. Bert Jansch's guitar work is very good (of course) but it's from a time when he was drinking very heavily and to me lacks any real bite or originality. The rest of the band are competent but rather ordinary, and the whole thing adds up to an inoffensive, pleasant piece of background music, acceptable for late student nights after a few non-proprietary cigarettes but not much more.

It's not Bert's greatest work by a long stretch. However, it's pleasant enough stuff and a nice record of his first meeting with the woman who became his stabilising rock and whom he ultimately married. As a fan, I'm glad to have it in my collection, but I can't see me playing it much and I can only really give it a rather lukewarm recommendation.