Jim Ghedi's Wasteland is a folk renaissance masterpiece

The starkly brutal surroundings and apocalyptic undertow proves a perfect match to the Sheffield-based folk guitarist’s fourth solo album (sixth if you count two excellent sets of guitar instrumentals as a duo with Toby Hay, whose 2018 solo album The Longest Day is an unsung gem).

There’s often solid reasons to be skeptical when an artist embarks on a bold departure from their usual musical habitat. Widescreen and epic in intent yet deeply personal and intimate in execution, brutal and bleak in its themes but ultimately full of stark and brutal beauty, Wasteland – which finds Ghedi plugging in and amplifying the volume and intensity to unleash a very literally huge new sound - proves a startlingly assured exception to the rule.

As well as being compulsory listening for anyone impressed by the simultaneously respectful and iconoclastic rebooting of folk traditions exemplified by Lankum, the frequently spellbinding, unflinchingly assertive results should prove equally compelling for fans of vintage British folk-rock ala Fairport Convention, aficionados of grittier and doomier ends of post-rock and drone fiends who have blown out their eardrums at Sunn 0))) shows.

Political ire, a sense of societal unfairness and injustice, dexterous guitar virtuosity, keen feel for the natural world, multipart compositions, awareness of the links between roots and traditions and what is occurring in the here and now: Wasteland is thematically not that dramatic a departure from its predecessor, 2021’s In The Furrows of a Common Place. Whereas that album could at times feel like an uneasy truce between Ghedi’s absolute mastery of fingerpicked folk guitar and his newfound ambition as a politically and socially aware songwriter, Wasteland is utterly, thrillingly and uncompromisingly bold in its commitment to Ghedi’s majestically epic agenda of electric instrumentation, adrenalized rock band dynamics and dramatic string arrangements (which bring to mind the screeching crescendos of particularly foreboding film soundtracks), all in service of uniformly strong original tunes that wade waist-deep in folk traditions without ever adhering to the constraints of any dogmatic rulebook, and which Ghedi delivers with a newly widened vocal range, including regular lift-offs to a falsetto-powered upper register.

The themes of the soaring title track (a young man returns home after time spent away to find not much of anything in terms of opportunity or hope) and the acute desperation that drives “Hester” (both emitting a bleak, windswept beaty on par with the desolate environs of the Yorkshire moors, as well as being equipped with haunting tunes that are impossible to shake off after one or two exposures) fit equally well to the working communities of carpet-bagged 2025 model Britain as they do to the harsh and unforgiving bygone realities explored so memorably in Ben Myers’s inequality-ridden novel Gallows Pole, a definite kindred spirit to Wasteland alongside the more relentlessly grinding parts of Lankum’s False Lankum.

The see-sawing stop-start stutter of “Old Stones” sounds like Tortoise living off the grid in a remote house with a stack of vintage British folk-rock records for company, whilst the jaw-dropping, positively raging white-knuckled blast of “Sheaf & Feld” resembles a traditional sea shanty being struck by a particularly heavy lightning (apparently Ghedi’s first gig was Napalm Death, which isn’t hard to believe on this evidence). Next to this, the excursions to traditional material (including a welcome reprise of “What Will Become of England”, a despairing yet defiant one-off single from last year) can initially seem lightweight in comparison, but the likes of guitar-and-fiddle duet “Newtondale/John Blue” ultimately provide refreshing flashes of light to counter the dark clouds that hover over the musical and emotional heaviness of the original material.

Bruised yet defiant, fierce yet elegiac, Wasteland deserves to be counted amongst the genuine masterpieces to have emerged from the ongoing folk renaissance.