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(2016) The Magnetic North - Prospect of Skelmersdale
Review:
To inaugurate Britain’s second wave of post-war development in 1961, the small mining town of Skelmersdale — “Skem” to locals — was designated a New Town. Redeveloped to accommodate spillover residents from nearby Liverpool, the remade Skem slowly deteriorated over the next two decades when all of a sudden it received a totally unexpected new designation. By 1984, when a young Simon Tong‘s family relocated there, Skem had become the official center of the U.K.’s Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement, giving the place an entirely different flavor. Fast forward a couple more decades and Tong is a respected British rock musician — with stints in the Verve and Blur — reprising his role as part of the collaborative trio . The group, which also includes Erland Cooper and Hannah Peel, first debuted in 2012 with Orkney: Symphony of the Magnetic North, a stirring chamber pop suite informed by the rugged Scottish islands of Cooper’s homeland. For their second project, it’s Tong’s turn to revisit his home on the pastoral Prospects of Skelmersdale. Where the cinematic beauty of the Orkney archipelago must have provided ample inspiration, Skem’s mix of blocky, run-down estates and new age mysticism no doubt presented a unique challenge for the trio. Rather than an outright concept album, Prospects of Skelmersdale feels like an abstract tribute to its strange subject, glancing over different aspects of the city’s still-changing landscape in brief, lightly orchestrated snapshots peppered with strings, brass, and guitars, and threaded with vintage audio samples from the Skelmersdale Development Corporation. For all of Skem’s troubles, the band strikes a decidedly optimistic tone, bookending the album with pieces that reflect its TM heritage. Opener “Jai Guru Dev” is a woozy, pump organ-aided hymn that honors the founding of the city’s golden-domed temple, while the closing track is a gentle rendition of “Run of the Mill” by George Harrison, an early and highly visible proponent of TM movement. In between these songs, the Magnetic North examine a range of emotions from observations on a mundane bus trip on “Death in the Woods,” to the solidarity of hope on the gorgeous “Sandy Lane,” whose chorus of “you are golden” ripples out sweetly against string sections and flute trills.
From a musical standpoint, Prospects of Skelmersdale is appropriately more compact in scope than the Orkney album, slimming down the orchestrations in favor of smaller dramas and textured soundscapes that reflect its subject’s disparate social mix. A much different but just as powerful statement as their debut, the Magnetic North have once again crafted something that is wholly unique.
Tracklist:
01 Jai Guru Dev.flac
02 Pennylands.flac
03 A Death In The Woods.flac
04 Sandy Lane.flac
05 Signs.flac
06 Little Jerusalem.flac
07 Remains Of Elmer.flac
08 Cergy-Pontoise.flac
09 Exit.flac
10 The Silver Birch.flac
11 Northway-Southway.flac
12 Run Of The Mill.flac
Summary:
Country: UK
Genre: chamber pop, indie-folk
Media Report:
Source : CD
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : ~ 788-925 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits |
