antigen records / Righteous Holler Recordings present
Sing Your Life EP by Rev Simpkins & the Phantom Notes
OUT NOW on all major digital platforms. GET IT HERE.
On Friday 1st May, Rev Simpkins returned with Sing Your Life, the lead single from his forthcoming album, Big Sea, his first LP for 11 years. Sing Your Life is a boisterous blast of hopeful, life-affirming energy, backed with three non-album tracks about his beloved Suffolk Coast: Dunwich, Shingle Street (Brass Band Version), and The Orfordness Lighthouse is Falling into the Sea Blues.
Suffolk-Essex based sinner-songwriter and guttural gospeller, the Rev’d Matthew Simpkins’s music is an unholy brew of outlandish tunefulness, string-snapping fingerpicking, and sanctified psychedelia. Before he was ordained an Anglican priest, Matt gained notoriety through his raucous and melodious exploits in Fuzzface, his heavy-weight hollering in gospel fiddle duo Sons of Joy, a pair of audacious Rev Simpkins LPs – Babbler & Crow and Lions, and through collaborating with Kenney Jones of the Small Faces to reconstruct the orchestral parts of their 1968 psychedelic masterpiece Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake.
Written around a time of illness experienced by him and Phantom Notes’ drummer James De’ath, Big Sea is an exuberant celebration of the peaks and troughs of life and death through off-kilter songs about east coast creeks, shattering storms, mystic pelicans and the Colchester martyrs. Shades of the Kinks and Captain Beefheart meld with church choirs and pipe organs, pre-war Gospel Blues, string orchestras, brass bands, and Bert Jansch style finger-picking. Big Sea features Ady Johnson (FuzzFace), Daniel Merrill (Dead Rat Orchestra, Sons of Joy), Toby Bull (FuzzFace) and others, and was recorded in Colchester, Cornard and Cairo (Egypt). The accompanying full colour 32-page illustrated book was created in collaboration with artist Tom Knight and features a foreword by Stephen Cottrell (Archbishop of York elect).
REV SIMPKINS 