(Dead Forest Records, 2025)
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REVIEW :
The best-kept secret of the northern reaches of Scotland is Ali Murray, a singer-songwriter who calls the Isle of Lewis home. I’ve written about a couple of Murray’s records over the years, but I’ve really only scratched the surface of the prolific musician – under a variety of projects, he’s made music encompassing the worlds of slowcore, folk (both “traditional” and “indie rock”-focused), dream pop, ambient, shoegaze, fuzz rock, post-punk and more... 'The Summer Laden' has its own detours, but it’s primarily an album fully re-embracing folky, slowcore-inspired indie rock of both the acoustic and electric varieties. Sometimes 'The Summer Laden' is pin-drop quiet, sometimes it’s relatively amped-up, but it pretty much always feels like a delicate, thoughtful thirty-minute journey through the world of a talented and somewhat iconoclastic singer-songwriter.
The range of Murray is on full, constant display in the album's first half – he begins the record with the title track, a carefully-arranged chamber pop exercise that folds unexpectedly into the fuzzed-out indie rock of “Heaven All the Way” (the record’s loudest song and the one with the most divergent vocal performance from Murray) and then once again veers into a different world, this time via the acoustic folk of “Toby”. The verses of “Heaven All the Way” may feel pretty dark and obscure for Murray, but the singer surfaces for a beautiful shoegaze-pop chorus, and he’s able to unite some of The Summer Laden’s more disparate moments in this way, too, like the mid-record duo of “Don’t Fade on Me” and “July the Spiral”, which jump a little further into the realms of electronic-touched, rhythmic dream pop.
The one song that rivals “Heaven All the Way” in terms of pure electricity is the album’s penultimate track, “Last to Leave” – this one is based on chugging power chords, typically held in some restraint but every now and then offering up minor explosions to go alongside Murray’s star-reaching vocals (see also the acoustic track “Starlit Beaches”, in which Murray gives so much to the barebones recording that it feels much “fuller” than it is on paper). It’s a good a time as any to get in on this particular secret.
- Rosy Overdrive
Stream/Buy/Download :
https://alimurray.bandcamp.com/album/the-summer-laden---
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