Witchazel

Matt Berry has starred as eccentric explorer Dixon Bainbridge in the Mighty Boosh and Douglas Reynholm in the it crowd but Witchazel is Berry’s voyage into the heart of the countryside, where strange things happen and barn doors go creak in the night. Recorded almost entirely in his front room, it is a collection of thirteen songs which will touch a central nerve with anyone with a fondness for British psychedelia and / or ’70’s folk. for Matt, it’s a labour of love, pure and simple. Veering between spooked folk laments (‘accident at a harvest festival’), space rock tapestries (eight minute epic ‘the pheasant’) and Donovan-esque pop (‘look in my book’), it’s quite simply a stunning record; the sort of woodland fantasia Fleet Foxes would make had they grown up in within earshot of the m25. If the massed mellotrons, fruity hammond and prog-rock inflections (check out ‘from the manger to the mortuary’) makes it feel like a lost classic you’ve found in the racks of your favourite second hand record shop, it’s deliberate.