My Review: At Swim Two Birds - Quigley’s Point

 At Swim Two Birds - Quigley's Point

Vini Reilly is a magician who rents heavenly scenes, Johnny Marr turns them into wind, Roger Quigley puts both on his golden fingertips and rents small rooms in which to make dreams solid. 

This incipit might be enough to say where the stylistic figure of a painter who has written an album about his relationship with a very sweet girl dwells: the music reproduces her features, her accommodating laugh, the smoke dust of perpetually lit pipes and the desire to use the six-string as a loving tam tam always at the disposal of his lightning bolts.

There is no past at the time of writing these letters, which seek in memory a suspension from pain, a scream made obedient to the nature of a mind devoted to embrace.

Nourishing the tears of continuous anaesthesia is a great effort. He knows this and decides to publish his disappointment side by side with grains of joy, with a more subtle songwriting than that of The Montgolfier Brothers who, with Mark Tranmer, had made us discover how Nick Drake and Tim Buckley, with less emphasis and more flair for storytelling, could sound like good guys, as well as beautiful.

Then the end (Roger has known many...) brought about a return to Salford, he who had been born there, leaving Manchester with only a few monthly episodes.

In a bored room waiting for an earthquake, the blond songwriter fills his ashtrays and sheet music, with arpeggios that move from American folk to Portuguese fado, to the most intimate dream pop, and then writes words capable of caressing the hair of his memories.

His singing is respectful, without bitterness, leaving the disintegration of dialogue to the long arpeggiated solos.

He uses, for his first real solo episode, street recordings, his walks in the parks, birds, work in progress, sequestering the fog of Weaste and Langworthy and then surrounding them with electronics and primordial software to chill his sad breathing.

He whispers into the microphone, catches his breath amidst clouds of smoke and then throws himself into writing atmospheres that seem to have been born for a film in which faces and stories are imbued with uncertainty and desolation but, believe the Old Scribe, there have been many laughs on the stave and the certainty that a record is not a collection, but an important and decisive seeding.

Anticipating part of the New Acoustic Movement, which used patterns, midi, soft and never invasive electronics, the good Roger established a new boundary between disclosure and mystery.

To understand this, one only has to pay attention to the long musical suites where a phrasing is repeated but never with the intention of becoming a loop, given the typical inserts of the 1960s arrangers.

At that precise moment, everything goes dark, the stories disappear and the music becomes a mute mouth capable of swinging emotions.

Nervous, polished fingers glide over the neck of his Takamine, with the diploma of beatification, given the perfect technique and the ability to often double the six-string with precise work assignments, like twins speaking different languages, without lacking in understanding.

His background has no place here: his listenings were aimed at the music of the city, whereas in this solo debut we are wandering around the globe and through time, as if true freedom were the distancing from reality.

And indeed the lyrics are deceptions, torture, like the music: it sounds like a magical collective trying to reach into creation to embrace listeners.

Instead Dante and his Inferno are right in these grooves, in walks with fake clothes and so much real pain to sift through hope.

Brazil, Portugal, Swinging London, Paris and the writer after whom his project was named with a fabulous novel are the main protagonists, followed by a plethora of tangled dreams.

Sarah Records credited Quigley with knowing by heart how to stumble with pure sanity through the convoluted guitar exercises of which Reilly and Marr were absolute masters.

The strings, the often deliberately odd rhythms and the production that tried to anaesthetise the abundance of sounds are the most intense moments of this Salfordian vessel that remembers well the harbour and the struggles with Liverpool.

To the latter city Roger gives a lot of space: in the introductions of several songs the magical atmosphere of Merseyside in 1975 and 1976 seem to pop up like free-flowing moonbeams.

I think, however, that the most difficult aspect to sustain is the inclination of the late talent to say goodbye, between goodbyes and farewells that embrace each other, making listening a wound, just like the writing of these hypnotic verses, but also capable of being delightful obstinacies full of smiles and charm.                                 Certain absences are striking, certain decisions that have led to the choice of making the interpretative layer uninflated except in the episode I Need Him, in which his devastation is transformed into an accommodating gentle form of words stolen from a reality that established the end of a relationship.

Two different sides, with structures and dynamics that revolve within a projectuality that provides a longitudinal path, capable, that is to say, of transmitting the moulting of the skin of his soul, like a pitchfork renting kisses from hay. 

The first part is a faithful account of ancient happiness, the second a bitter realisation of the precipice, and indeed the stylistic scenarios change.

Remarkable is the hue in the last track made of dream pop confetti, from which Tom McRae and Radiohead then stole profusely.

A systematic mode of freedom paid dearly, the evolution of his style will bring him back into the arms of Tranmer, if only for a moment.                                 But this album is an unparalleled exercise, whether in romance with the black coat and the eyes still searching for a mouth to touch, or in songs that make you reflect on how happiness is only the outpost of the atomic bomb...

A record that generated mental orgasms and applause from critics: never before had fragmentations been heard to create connections with softness, with the polite propensity to grate the less hard side of a decade that seemed to prefer noises to whispers.

Indeed, certain experiences touch more when one has to sharpen one's listening.

And after more than twenty years it seems that the secrets of this jewel continue to emerge, making the face of his compositions a splendid Greek amphitheatre where poetry is an inferior art: Roger's verses are immediate and reflective, not seeking memory, but rather a way of giving each moment a quick escape…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

1st December 2024

https://open.spotify.com/album/4r8D9GORVR1xg7sMUS7hjl?si=QSgE7qCjRmaOU7nBRsQBvA