If a musician has a distinctive instrumental signature, does he need to switch his writing hand, as it were, and sign his name as a singer? Jimi Hendrix evidently thought so, and managed a recognizable, if not tuneful, vocal scrawl. Miles Davis evidently thought not, and his influence remains more indelible than ink.
Cian Nugent is some distance from the legends of Hendrix and Davis, but on his previous two albums, 2013’s Born With the Caul and 2011’s Doubles, the Irishman established a rep as a fingerpicking guitarist fond of extending a pastorally free-form instrumental until it could fill one side of an LP.
Night Fiction is more segmented, with seven tracks across 42 minutes, but it’s also Nugent’s emergence as a singer-songwriter. He’s still backed by many personnel from his band, The Cosmos, yet he’s put his name alone above the title and taken primary credit for the songs.
Those songs are often as pastoral as Nugent’s earlier instrumentals, albeit with less wandering. The opener, “Lost Your Way,” is reminiscent of a Derek and the Dominoes folk-rock B-side, while “Shadows” consumes much of its energy in a meditative lament until its lengthy coda replaces words with expressive horns.
“Lucy,” an entirely wordless acoustic piece, is a brief reminder of the Richard Thompson-like dexterity and simplicity with which Nugent can play, and “Year of the Snake” closes the album with nearly 12 minutes of what Television or the Velvet Underground might have done had they spent more time in rural splendor.
Alas, Nugent’s vocals contribute little to that splendor. They are flat and somewhat dour in their resemblance to those of the Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster. While Nugent’s guitar fills musical pages with curlicues, for now his voice can’t escape the confines of ruled lines and margins.
