Tashi Dorji – low clouds hang, this land is on fire

The Bhutanese-via-North Carolina guitarist Tashi Dorji has spent the last decade-and-a-half playing solo guitar with the fiery fervour of free-jazz, his output a wildly varied stream of solo records and collaborations all showcasing his sometimes beautifully dextrous, sometimes magnetically slipshod playing style. Where on previous records his guitar has rattled and clanged as a scrapheap retort to the tumult of our times, low clouds hang, this land is on fire is muted and resigned, the stark tactility of his acoustic work shed in favour of softer tones and languorous reverb. The record is a vision of the aftermath of the political battlegrounds of his previous records and it sounds like we lost. Now there’s only the husks of dead industry and pylons coughing out last broadcasts; if you’ve ever been hungover in Tradeston you’ll know the feeling.

It’s a deliberate attempt to reflect the political exhaustion of the era, and it’s well done; Dorji remains a superb judge of when to introduce melody into the haze, but for a lot of its runtime you can’t help but wish for more. There are swathes of the album where the directionless drift becomes grating, the ease with which it slips into the background troubling. It makes a track like black flag anthems, which in its scrambled noise allows character and drama to wander through the fog, desperately tantalising. It reminds you that it is an incredibly evocative sound world he has created, but it begs for further exploration than it is afforded.

Listen to: black flag anthems, storm the heavens, But go not "back to the sediment" in the slime of the moaning sea, For a better world belongs to you, And a better friend to me