An album that starts with a fine tune is always welcome. "Dreaming Beds" has all the best of independent Scots music. Heartbreak, restraint, understatement, intelligence, gradual additions to a hypnotic guitar line and a dreamlike lift into a secondary tune towards the end. Perfect.
Benbecula Records did a great service by issuing this collection in their Minerals Series. Part retrospective, part taster for a major new album to be called "Sound in Space", "Low Power Key" is an excellent introduction to a haunted and beautiful sonic world. I'm sure that many would respond to if only they knew it was there. Do your best - track it down.
I became a fan of the nearly private SMACKVAN about the time of their "evil entering" EP and it's good to hear the macabre "Metallic Taste" from that very dark collection reset in this format. There's chilling sonic content in "Drunk" too - this one from the earlier album, 2000's "Company of Women".
However, chilling soundtracks, laced with acrid electronic fumes and haunted with processed sounds (as in the technosounding "Gas") are just a part of the SMACKVAN landscape. There are ambitious tunes, instrumental depth, voices and lyrics too. Core members Alan Parker, Gerry Tonner, Michael Feeney and Owen McAulay have been bringing diverse elements together for long enough now to have discovered a natural instinct for avoiding formulae without ever sounding wilful or obtuse.
A constant theme is that whatever sounds have been chosen and brought together will be explored and exposed for weight, delicacy, texture, decay and any other quality that's there to be discovered in their smallest parts. Nothing gets buried or drowned. There is a fighting chance of hearing everything and no chance of knowing for sure how all the sounds have been made. The pace is necessarily slow and some might say "gloomy". But the myriad joys of single notes uncurling and fraying at the edges, played on impossible stringed instruments in "Guitar in Space" are there for pleasure and contentment, underlying minor intervals notwithstanding.
|
"My Happiness", which follows is classic McAulay (I thought) but it is, in fact, Michael Feeney's finely sung compossition. It's dry, but devastatingly emotional in that restrained Scottish way. The slightest addition of an extra bit of guitar in the accompaniment arrives like sunshine and leaves nothing but warmth and serenity as the song closes. The longer "Evening Stars" starts with more and provides a rich finale of processional tempo, building to a rather grand farewell. The auguries for "Sound in Space" are strong.
Tracklisting
1 Dreaming Beds
2 Wall to Wall Flesh
3 Gas
4 Metallic Taste
5 Drunk
6 The Future Tense
7 Coast to Coast
8 Guitar in Space
9 My Happiness
10 Evening Stars
http://www.benbecula.com
http://www.smackvan.com/smackvan
|
