Though he’s known primarily amongst prog fans for his work with Seven Wilson in No Man, Tim Bowness is also an established musician in his own right and one who never ceases to amaze. Following on from 2022’s Butterfly Mind, on this new release, Powder Dry, he’s come up with an album of 16 mostly short pieces of music, with the longest not even touching five minutes, and all inside a 40-minute framework. He’d initially written 27 pieces but thought this could be overkill.
This new release is very different from anything he’d previously been associated with. His previous solo works have often harked back to his formative years in the early eighties, and usually drew on the contributions from famous friends .. his previous album, Butterfly Mind, possibly his most successful album to date, featured Ian Anderson, Peter Hammill and Greg Spawton. But on this album, he’s completely alone, it’s truly a Tim Bowness solo album, and once again he’s drawn from the sounds of his youth by incorporating elements of spiky post-punk and electro-pop. This is evident with opener ‘Rock Hudson’, described as a ‘paranoid ode to online discourse’ and released as a single, very 80’s techno and, given his work in No Man, this shouldn’t be any great surprise, but on this album, it’s the dominating feature of his work.
On other albums, he’s focussed on songs which tell stories and his music creates and evokes images of lush soundscapes, but on this album, the big themes of ‘ideological extremism, eco-apocalypse and the all-too-human quest for love in troubled times’ .. are wrapped up inside a series of very short pieces of techno and trance, such as Old Crawler and Lost Not Lost, whereas other pieces come over somewhat different and come over with the directness of a singer-songwriter. With what sounds like an acoustic guitar backing, Stand Up for the Dying is a warmly atmospheric piece of music written in the shadow of his partner’s mother having pancreatic cancer.
Overall, this is a very diverse collection of mostly short pieces, somewhat different from what’s gone before but showing Tim Bowness is still making interesting music by being ready to challenge himself.
