When guitarist Bill Orcutt dropped off the edge of the world after his band, Harry Pussy, imploded sometime in the late-90s, a buncha people were really fucking sorry. His guitar playing in that group, alongside Adris Hoyos’s phenomenal drums and vocals, pretty much established a whole new blueprint for post-hardcore avant rock destruction. The fact that there isn’t a Harry Pussy tribute band in every fucking suburban town the world over is only down to that fact that Orcutt and Hoyos’s playing was so far beyond technique that no one could hope to even ape em, so in their absence everyone went back to jamming drones, triggering loops and gargling random alphabets. And while Hoyos fell in with the whole Swill Radio cabal for a while, Orcutt’s lack of a profile led to a buncha rumours, the most popular one being something to do with how he had jacked in music cause the underground was strictly for jerks and he was now working on some experimental movie in the wilds of nowhere. So it was as shocking as a power electronics fan turning up with a girlfriend when a solo 7” from Orcutt came out of nowhere earlier this year before being hoovered up by lovers of the good stuff and locked away in secure record vaults the world over. Then came the news that he was only going to be jamming at Nyoukis’s Colour Out Of Space with the best free jazz drummer in the UK, Mr Paul Hession and then - now (!) -- comes this motherfucker, a full-length solo album privately issued by Orcutt himself with virtually nada in terms of inside info. On A New Way To Pay Old Debts Orcutt is playing a four-string acoustic guitar – and he is fucking *playing* it. Like the “High-Waisted” 7”, the material picks up where Sonny Sharrock left the instrument hanging on Black Woman’s “Blind Willie”, with an amphetamine-blues style that combines feral vocal grunts and squeals (almost in the style of early Mazzacane), the kind of aggressive raga form of Roger McGuinn’s furthest navigations of “Eight Miles High”, the formally staggering, postcard-from-another-world feel of Joseph Spence’s Folkways recordings and a spike of hardcore adrenaline. The music retains the incredible dynamism of Harry Pussy, from the dive-bombing bass strings that resound like sprung traps through the lightning flash of the treble. Like Derek Bailey, a player that Orcutt has a lot in common with, Orcutt’s technique comes from the inside, it’s not about F/X or loops or fuzz or any kind of extended technique, it’s one man wrestling with the idea of guitar as sonic reducer. His approach is so tactile, so monomaniacal in its blunt physicality, like when he obsesses over the same screaming single note again and again, shadowing it with the same vocal cry before dropping into zagging barbed-wire repeats, that it feels like the most exciting free/rock/jazz/blues of your lifetime. Indeed, this LP shows up alla the solo acoustic guitar artists of the past whenever as a buncha dull furniture polishers. The ultimate solo guitar record form the greatest rock guitarist of the ‘noise’ era. A no-brainer for album of the year. Comes with pro-printed sleeves, self-released on Orcutt’s own private press. Highest possible recommendation.