Seafarers Music

Master of the forlorn torch-song Will Oldham returns to the fold with an elegiac suite of plaintive, instrumental acoustica, which forms the soundtrack to a brand new independent documentary by director Jason Massot. Opening track ‘Sapele’ is especially alluring; teetering and swooping like an unplugged version of Mogwai’s mind-blowing take on the ancient Jewish hymn, ‘My Father, My King’. The doc itself sounds fascinating too, a sort of Bukowski-meets-Bladerunner fable, tracking a quartet of hard-drinking multi-national seafarers through the futuristic Rotterdam cityscape during a brief period of downtime in-between voyages. Stirring stuff.