Honey Steel’s Gold

For many, Honey Steel’s Gold is Kuepper’s finest album, his resonating classic. It’s certainly one of his most powerful collections of songs, and the performances – with a group that included his long-time drummer Mark Dawson, and pianist Chris Abrahams, now best known as a member of The Necks – are uniformly limber and elegant. There’s a classicism to some of the songs, like “Closer”, that recalls the wood-panelled folk of ‘70s Witchseason productions, and there are hints of the underlying drone logic of the blues in songs like the title track. Really, Kuepper’s breathing out here, after clearing the air with the preceding year’s Today Wonder – and this was the beginning of a particularly winning streak of music for him. Maybe it is his masterpiece, after all.