Diverse new albums from Memory Drawings, Keiron Phelan & Peace Signs and Andy Bell leave the review pile for an accumulated assessment

With our current Covid-shadowed autumn of discontent likely to lead into a longer-than-wanted winter, music will be one of things to help us get through it all again. Below then are another three possible sonic companion contenders of defiantly dissimilar stripes…

For a label possessing an overarching ‘autumn ambience’ default setting, it’s perhaps no surprise that the likeminded members of Memory Drawings would eventually return to the recently rebooted Second Language with A Few Scattered Hours, for the first time since 2012’s Music for Another Loss. Although still based around the core ‘super-group’ quartet of Joel Hansen (hammered dulcimer, keyboards, percussion), Richard Adams (acoustic guitar), Sarah Kemp (violin) and Gareth S Brown (piano), the cast list expands once more with extra guest players adding layers of drums, percussion, bass, cello and keyboards.

However, for all the additional accomplices, a significant chunk of proceedings refer back to the earlier go-to Memory Drawing templates, with Hansen’s dulcimer lines leading the way through leaf-fall covered and low-sun dappled chamber-folk scene-paintings, that are both reassuringly rousing (“The Same Indifference” and “Days I’m Happy to Forget”) and reflective (“That’s Telling” and “Right to Be Forgotten”). Yet, as on 2017’s The Nearest Exit LP and the fairly recently reissued Phantom Lights mini-album – the band’s last two official releases – when the self-set formulas are stretched or stripped down things do become more interesting. This is particularly true with the stripped back violin and piano pairing of “Trace Elements of Humility” wordlessly echoing Tindersticks’ classic “Cherry Blossoms”, the post-classical textures piled on top of prowling Can basslines across “Dead to Me Now” and the State River Widening-meets-Rachel’s pastoral post-rock meldings of the title track.

Interestingly, it’s the bundled Remixes & Reworks bonus disc of the 2L CD edition (which also comes as a download with the single platter Zozaya Records vinyl version) that transmutes A Few Scattered Hours into something even more distinctive and exotic. Amongst the highlights of the reshaped pieces you’ll find Giulio Aldinucci stretching out “Exit Wounds” with elegiac drone-framing; Insides inverting “The Right to Be Forgotten” with gentle tropical percussion, Cédric Pin & Glen Johnson dirtily dubbing-up “Dead to Me Now” and Mücha cloaking “I Guess You Never Know” with ghostly glitchtronics and ethereal vocals.  

Taken as a whole bundle, the expansive twin-presentation of A Few Scattered Hours captures a set of contemplative moods that are ripe to soundtrack the current shifts in seasons.

Almost the complete antithesis of the Memory Drawings set is Hobby Jingo from Keiron Phelan & Peace Signs on Gare Du Nord. This second semi-solo collection from the State River Widening, Phelan Sheppard, Smile Down Upon Us and Littlebow explorer is a wonderfully infectious pre-winter warmer, that in non-pandemical arrival patterns would have been a proper summertime product.

If its predecessor, 2018’s Peace Signs, was a sublime subverted 70s art-pop classicist statement then this sequel sets itself the slightly tougher task of also adding in upended 80s AOR idioms and other somewhat unfashionable flavours into the melting pot. Whilst Hobby Jingo doesn’t have quite same abundance of benevolent brain-burrowing earworms, due to a higher quotient of slow paced pieces, it’s still a hearty hook-laden stew. Now sporting a blue-suited twist on The Man from Del Monte look, as well as being aided and abetted again by an ensemble with a knack for lush but never over-polished arrangements, Phelan takes us through a suite of songs stuffed – yet never over-gorged – with dark lyrical wit and pathos.

Thus, there are – deep breath – tales of faked moon landings and Eurovision set in sumptuous Caribbean cocktail bar settings with nods to Scott Walker and Burt Bacharach (“You Never Put a Man on the Moon” and “The Man Who Sang Eurovision”); soaring harmony-rich Prefab Sprouted pieces with food-based romantic allegories (“Candy Floss Hair” and “Cinnamon Synthesis”); languid twanging Hawaiian-tinged balladry (“How Are You Getting Home, Imogen?” and a cover of Aphrodite Child’s “Break”); strangely contagious Paul McCartney & Wings-goes-barroom-reggae stomping (“New Best Friend”); ornate waltzing Divine Comedy-like musings on the Kaiser Wilhelm the First life story (“What Kaiser Did”); and clavinet vs flute funk (“Sixth Form Poetry”).

Packed with flair and invention over its many memorable moments, Hobby Jingo is recommended for repeat visits, to lift the spirits and soothe the soul through the long slog to next spring.

Somewhat rising above it all by following less earthbound artistic trajectories, is A View From Halfway Down, the first proper and long-in-the-works solo long player from Andy Bell, on Sonic Cathedral. With the bill paying interregnum memories of playing in Oasis and Beady Eye now fading away due to a well received Ride rebirth and electronica essaying under the covert GLOK guise, Bell sustains his admirable career relaunch here. Opening with the majestical psych-gaze euphoria of “Love Comes in Waves”, the bar is set high from the off, through a transcendental but unforced rechannelling of elements from Ride’s seminal Nowhere and Going Blank Again LPs. Whilst nothing else quite comes close to surpassing such a strong start, the rest of the record still unpeels to reveal some very satisfying moments.

Hence, you’ll find impressive beats-bolstered spins on Lazer Guided Melodies-era Spiritualized (with the gauzy backwards-vocals infused “Indica”); gorgeous lysergic-rusticism (“Ghost Folk”); chiming and bobbing space-rock (“Skywalker”); electro-acoustic motorik-pop (“Cherry Cola”); drowsy near-hymnal minimalism (“I Was Alone”); and strung-out ambient-techno (“Heat Haze On Weyland Road”).

Although not all of the eight tracks go the full distance – with the slightly noodly “Aubrey Drylands Gladwell” sounding a tad unfinished – on the whole A View From Halfway Down is a smouldering triumph and certainly a deserved dream come true for Sonic Cathedral owner Nathaniel Cramp.

Adrian
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