Passing Craze, the brilliant new album by Tom Emlyn is now available to order in black 180gm vinyl on Dirty Carrot Records.
 
This release is limited. Each vinyl individually numbered! Get it whilst you can!
 
For fans of Bob Dylan, Scott Walker, Tom Waits, Elliott Smith, Leonard Cohen, John Cale
 
Side A
 
1. Starsick
2. Miss Understood
3. Goldfish Bowl
4. Burning the Candle
5. Passing Craze
6. Your Dishes
7. Shenandoah Rag
 
Side B
 
1. Lost in a Dream
2. doyouseethesameshadeofblue?
3. A Series of Misunderstandings
4. The Last World War
5. Rarebit
6. The Great Welsh Novel
7. When the Album's Done
 
Album notes by Gary Raymond
 
Great music is all about ideas — finding them, teasing around with them, presenting them as your own rather than an accumulation of gatherings from the ether. Tom Emlyn’s music suggests a songwriter and song-maker who profoundly understands this. Not a second of Passing Craze is uninteresting, not a moment of it gets lost to the wandering mind that deadens so much modern music-making. 
 
Emlyn is a breed of very modern songwriter, the type who have found a singular way to mark their personality with searching chord riffs and winding progressions. Like B.C. Camplight or Cass McCombs, the guitar is the orchestra. There are hints of consummate composers such as Elvis Perkins and Steve Mason and more than the occasional nod to vaudevillian romance and the nostalgia of the red rose speedway.
 
Lyrically, Emlyn is drenched in irony like those guys too — but with an added bit of Lloyd Cole or kitchen-sink John Grant (without the grating self-pity); perhaps a bit of Woody Guthrie if he’d had the opportunity to hang out more with Morrissey. Ry Cooder by way of Ealing Studios. And a sense of humour is so important to the landscapes. There is a gleeful monochrome to the dioramas, a winning glint in the eye. It’s all very urban, all very bedsit (or whatever the 2026 equivalent is to that indy sub-genre), even when the keyboards do some carnival banter in the middle-distance. 
 
The songs are rich and full of the joys of the craft. “Goldfish Bowl” sports a popping McCartney-esque bassline. “A Series of Misunderstandings” apes Ray Davies at his most laconic. “The Last World War” will have you swaying your pint pot like a Clancy Brother.  “The Great Welsh Novel” is an acerbic take on modern creative life with more than a nod to Dylan’s “Wedding Song” from Planet Waves. It’s important to set yourself in a tradition when writing great songs, but if the trick is to do something fresh with familiar tools and patterns, then Passing Craze succeeds. An album by god, written as one, sequenced as one, and unashamedly in love with the form, full of serious songs about serious things that doesn’t take itself too seriously. We could do of more of that in the world, for sure.