ALBUM REVIEW: Andrew Johnson – To Call Me A Cult Would Be Somewhat Misleading

Andrew Johnson titles his album as though he is daring you not to read the back of the sleeve, and To Call Me A Cult Would Be Somewhat Misleading is no exception. Released on his own Shoebox Records on 5th June as a 50-copy limited CD, it’s the latest entry in a catalogue that has quietly ballooned into the dozens, with the prolific Bandcamp archive alone running past sixty back releases.

Andrew Johnson writes, performs and produces everything himself, and at eleven tracks and just under 41 minutes, this is another tightly drawn instalment from an artist who treats the album as his default unit of expression rather than an occasional event.

The track titles do a lot of the talking before a note is played. Build Me A Guillotine opens things with characteristic bluntness, while Love Is Just An Opinion and Death Spiral suggest a writer more interested in unsettling turns of phrase than easy hooks. Temple Of Love (Pts 1 & 2) is the one outside collaboration here, co-written with saxophonist Izzy Neish, whose contribution gives the record’s centrepiece a different texture to lean on. Closer Sonny Boy and the gallows pun of Cats Catching Fire round out a tracklist that reads like a one-man show working through a stack of difficult headlines.

What’s most striking about Johnson as a working artist is the sheer rate of output, an album like this arriving as one data point in an ongoing, self-sustaining practice rather than a rare event. Filed under alternative rock and indie pop, the record sits in that lane of UK DIY songwriting where limited runs and home production are simply how the work gets made and heard. Whether To Call Me A Cult… lands as confessional or comic, ominous or knowing, will depend on how it actually sounds in the room, but the title alone promises Andrew Johnson hasn’t lost his nerve for going his own way.