Cargo Records

Threefold Return

Bridging the great divide from South London to the Deep South, Bob Meyer is one of those individuals who, while showing no desire to crave the spotlight, assimilates and homages his influences to emerge with statements of unadorned and unrelenting honesty.

Sounding like they could be recorded in your front room, the songs on his second album, Threefold Return, intimately straddle anyone from Nick Drake to Blind Willie Johnson but what shines through is the man's honest and restless, questing musical passion. Bob's also a shit-hot guitar player, first picking up the instrument at the age of ten courtesy of his older brother, who built them.

Maybe put off by his own left-handedness, Bob didn't touch a guitar again until the age of 31when he did a Hendrix by turning the instrument upside down along with his teach yourself handbook. Within a month he was writing songs, later recording his 2006 debut album All This Is That in one afternoon at the Chocolate Box in Wood Green - all tracks first takes with no overdubs.

Americana-UK described the album as, "Primordial blues, tough and dirty, that harks back to Robert Johnson's template and at times comes close to being as powerful. Meyer has a real feel for the music and delivers real blues in a classic style." Guardian Unlimited called Bob, "an extraordinarily talented acoustic blues guitarist, a man who sings like his heart is buried in a Mississippi swamps".

Although the album didn't catapult him into a position to give up his day job as a truck-driver it paved the way for a second outing which throws out an uncanny timeline with America's 60s troubadours lashed with the stark guitar stylings of the blues musicians he reveres, particularly Blind Gary Davies, Leadbelly and Son House.

This blues fixation surfaces on tracks like Tilt and the stridently atmospheric I'm A Fool. Southwark Bridge recalls the drowsy observations of Nick Drake while As She Flows and When I'm Gone recall Greenwich Village singer-songwriters like the Tims Rose and Hardin.

The most enthralling excursions are instrumentals like Rollin' Part 3 and stunning Fast River Of No Return which recall nobody so much as the late John Fahey, the mysterious American genius who revolutionised the six-string steel guitar in the early 60s, inspiring names like Leo Kottke and Robbie Basho to develop their own individual styles.

It seems as if Bob's quietly become one of the few contemporary UK guitarists to do the same, emerging as Streatham's answer to Blind Joe Death while as equally at home on the dark blues holler of Mary Lou as the gentle instrumental Escondedo. By the closing Time To Go the album has simply cemented itself as a modern folk album without hype or unnecessary trimmings: these days something of a rare beast, as is its creator.