Still Corners - Dream Talk
London smiles, warms the engines of its frenetic heart and slows down the anxiety, precipitation and constantly updated chaos to welcome an album that will sweep away all the negativity of this important musical capital.
Amazing things happen: the ability to transport physical and mental well-being, dreams, delicacy within a positive beam of light that demands space. The atmosphere of the ten songs is a continuous rocking, with the ability to calibrate rhythms and melodies through a path composed of tame and light electronics, atoms of intriguing but never excessive pop, with a mixture that offers an ethereal sensation of dream pop oscillations in soft advance. The witch becomes an angel, her name is Tessa Murray and she is an enchantress by trade, with her simple, harmonious singing accents and the notes coming out of her uvula that are continuous caresses.
Her partner in the project, since 2007, is Greg Hughes, a craftsman of sound mixtures marked by depth in the search for combinations of musical genres, a blacksmith who gives rhythm and harmonies a thundering thunderbolt, drawing continual surprises with his changes of direction, manipulating our hearts towards the most pleasant of surrenders. Music like a waterfall that has a long range: it starts from the distant c-86 masked, it enters the borders of Trip-Hop always without being excessive, it uses guitars like gentle sabres, and everything settles down to be devoured without any will to yield. They are the two dreamiest artists, more into a work full of patterns, but always giving the feeling that for them the creative process is first and foremost a fun educated respect for the rules. With them, the song form unsupported by the Old Scribe finds instead a bow and a thank you: if there is a perfect way to experience it in fluctuating joy, it is precisely that proposed by the London duo.
They manifest kilometres of fantasy while chasing poetic dictates of living in harmony with the environment, time, in a dance that knows how to show intuitions towards places full of mystery, between the most spontaneous greenery and ancient rocks distributed in the fantastic mind of fairy tales for adults. The idea remains, convincingly, that all this presents a hypnotic session where one does not investigate, but benefits from emotions that reality conceals.
Recorded in four locations far apart, the compositions gently annihilate the physicality of it all, weaving a sonic slide that quickly connects them.
A truly delightful album, much needed by one and all that will make this time of ours a smile etched on the heart...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
5th April 2024
