Excerpts From ‘Clockdust’ UK Album Reviews
The Guardian 4/5*
“Ageless and eerily beautiful compositions”
Uncut 8/10*
“Richly textured music” “Clockdust maybe even more beguiling”
Mojo 4/5*
“Beautiful”
‘Q’ 4/5*
“Gorgeous autumnal melancholia” “The songwriting is more direct too, questions of mortality and nature are faced head on”
Mail on Sunday 4/5*
“A haunted timeless quality of it’s own”
Classic Pop 4/5*
“Another fascinating listen”
Long Live Vinyl 8/10*
“Utterly beguiling”
Secret Meeting 87/100*
“Clockdust is flavoured with nostalgia and reflection” “Find yourself in the right time and place, and there will be fewer better soundtracks this year”
Narc 5/5*
“The kind of gloriously multi-layered record that just demands to be listen to on repeat: as much a portal into another world as it is a collection of immaculately crafted songs. Divine stuff'“
Excerpts from ‘Clockdust’ International Album Reviews
Pop Matters 8/10* (North America)
“it’s catchy, carefully crafted, and tastefully arranged, meticulously blending acoustic and electronic elements and reaching out for reveries of darkness as it locates a tangy-sweet spot between past and present” “Animated by exotic and unexpected flourishes, Rustin Man has conjured another cohesive, gripping, and quirky statement that possesses it’s distinct character and feels detached from the contemporary soundscape”
Indie is not a Genre 4.4/5* [Germany]
Like ‘Drift Code’, ‘Clockdust’ is quiet, elegant, continually lush and well-arranged. But there is an added vaudevillian, carnivalesque quality to this release that accompanies its quiet calm
Beatblogger 4/5* (Germany)
“Wild and quietly fading spheres, jazz and pop insertions, psychedelic art ideas and casual fragility skilfully expand Rustin Man’s sound spectrum”
Kulttuuritoimitus 4/5* (Finland)
“Clockdust is a timeless, unobtrusive, intimate music that sounds decades old and patented
Blow Up 8/10* (Italy)
“One of the best albums of 2020”
Excerpts From ‘Drift Code’ UK Album Reviews
The Guardian 5/5*
“It sounds magnificent”
“Drift code has sturdy songs, which are in turn given a patina of age by the way Webb has recorded them. It’s not so much something like Our Tomorrows sounds as if it could have been recorded in 1971, more that it seems to exist in a time of it’s own. It’s gorgeous”
Mojo
Album Of The Month 4/5*
“Drift Code sounds like a single moment-albeit frozen and stretched, encompassing many moments. There’s not even a style to anchor it somewhere in time-pop and rock and jazz and folk seem suspended in aspic”
“Rather than genre per se, Webb’s voice belongs to a broad tradition of English melancholia-of sepia tones and sweet sadness”
The Times 4/5*
“A strange, undeniably beautiful anomaly of a record”
“Despite it’s extended birthing period, Drift Code has a sense of cohesion bound together by a mood stuck somewhere between romantic and despairing”
“There is a rainy, end-of-the-pier feel through out, as if it belongs to the world of John Osborne’s ailing music hall star in ‘The Entertainer”
“Not since Tom Waits has a singer made the world of show business seem so tawdry. Not that any of this is depressing as such because, as with so much apparently sad music, there is something comforting about Webb’s arcane vision”
Wire
“It’s heartening to discover that Webb’s first outing as Rustin Man without the ‘&’ is such a fully realised and cohesive piece of work”
“What Webb’s recording method sacrifices in freewheeling spontaneity it gains in idiosyncratic and carefully crafted atmospheres that subtly wrong-foot expectations”
“Webb proves his ability to build worlds whose orbits brush against the heart whilst always staying at arm’s length”
The Mail On Sunday 4/5*
“Warm, beautiful and quietly dramatic, like some dust-covered vintage device that mysteriously still works”
Hi Fi Choice 5/5*
“Extraordinary-hypnotic melancholic yet up-lifting. A real odyssey”
Record Collector 4/5*
“Drift code is a self-contained as it’s gestation period implies, sensitive to seasonal shifts but otherwise insulated from external concerns”
“Richly imagined and immersive, Drift Code draws you into its twilit world with a sure, stealthy grip”
Classic Pop 4/5*
“Drift Code’s a curio worthy of the wait”
Long Live Vinyl 8/10*
“Webb’s voice is startlingly beautiful”
“As richly detailed on piano as he was on bass”
Secret Meeting 85/100*
“The meticulous nature with which he has created the record has allowed Webb to produce something that sounds timeless. Despite a feeling of vulnerability, you also get the sense that our narrator has taken and absorbed everything the world has to throw at him and is still standing. Whether this world is the one we inhabit or the one in Webb’s mind isn’t clear, but the thirty seven minutes we spend there are jarringly wonderful”
“A vibrant, colourful thing of beauty. And believe me, it really is a thing of beauty”
The Scotsman 4/5* (Regional)
“Meticulously layered songs of mortality”
Buzz Magazine 4/5*
“If he had neighbours they’d be wondering what Rustin Man’s Paul Webb has been building in his barn for 17 years”
Excerpts from ‘Drift Code’ International Album Reviews
Rolling Stone 4.5/5* (Germany)
“Drift Code is the perfect follow up for Out Of Season”
Pitchfork (US)
“Drift Code doesn’t sound like Talk Talk (nor anything that could be described as “post-rock”), but what it shares with the band’s best work is both the sense of being adrift in time and a meticulous approach to production. These arrangements flicker with intricate melodic detail and nonconventional instrumentation”
Blow Up 8/10* (Italy)
Album Of The Month
“Drift Code is able to figure out the human essence with an almost superhuman serenity and warmth”
Brooklyn Vegan (US)
“Webb uses a lot of old sounds on this album, but he repurposes them in ways that feel new and exciting. The solos on ‘Judgement Train’ could be on a San Francisco pysch record from 1967, but the song as a whole sounds entirely fresh. Part of that is the warm, atmospheric production style that makes ‘Drift Code’ sound contemporary despite some half-century old influences. But mostly it’s Paul Webb’s ability to find inspiration from the past while looking at the future”
Le Monde (France)
“A fascinating cabinet of curiosities at the crossroads of orchestrated pop, jazz and blues-folk”
Tip 4/5* (Germany)
“Songs with love for details that exude warm melancholy and tell stories”
NPR Music (US)
“Broken and Beautiful”
Zero Magazine (Sweden) 9/10*
“I really like this album, it is exciting, original and unconventional. Well worth sinking deep into and listening to many, many times. This years biggest surprise so far”
ABC NEWS (Via Associated Press US)
“On “Drift Code,” he’s inviting us into his lair and it’s worth a visit”
Liberation (France)
‘One wonders why and how Paul Webb spent so much time in the shadows before revealing it to us”
Eclipsed 8/10* (Germany)
“Songs that in their entirety present a long phase of life and therefore claim a certain general validity. All of them are small works of art”
Oor Magazine (Netherlands)
“Drift Code is great”
La Musique a papa (France)
“Simple and Sublime”
Konkret (Germany)
Album Of The Month
“His excellent songwriting blends elegantly with jazz, blues and weird sounds”
Enola.be (Belgium)
“Drift Code is a record that qualifies for ‘the list’ at the end of this year, seems already certain to be certain”
Beatblogger 4/5* (Germany)
“You can hear the long exciting history of this record in every note”
Weirdsound.net (France)
“There is a real cinematic dynamic in the way the piece is designed”
Plattentests 8/10* (Germany)
“It contains the first compositions that this special artist thought up just for his own voice, and fortunately they have become as good as he deserves them to be”
Rockerilla (Italy)
“Not to be missed”
The New York Times (US playlist)
“Judgement Train is a bluesy, wah-wah-loving railroad ride toward an unknowable afterlife”
Falter (Austria)
“What a marvellous record”
FocusKnack.be 4/5* (Belgium)
“Timeless”
Cryptic Rock (US)
“Who said that music these days is soulless, artless and heartless? Who else but the lazy and jaded, whose ears are no longer attuned to anything new. Or, those who are not into complex music to begin with. However, to music enthusiasts who are always hungry for challenging yet enticing works of music, Paul Webb’s latest opus as Rustin Man is definitely something to savour slowly and to drift with wonderingly. For these reasons, Cryptic Rock gives ‘Drift Code’ 5 out of 5 stars”
La Voix du Nord (France feature)
“One of the beautiful surprises of this season is named Rustin Man”
HUMO (Belgium)
Album Of The Week
Soundi 4/5* (Finland)
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