S. E. Webster – Wedding Night
Like a Neo-Luddite reading the Unabomber’s Manifesto, classic songwriters, using the acoustic guitar and their words to craft their works, look at modern production sickened and with distrust.
S. E. Webster may have been born at just the right time to absorb the influence of great writers like Ray Davies, John Lennon, and that bearded hipster who sings about bedding Taylor Swift. However, he’s also been born at a time where he is destined to face an uphill battle to get his songs heard around the cacophony of overproduced beats and pop-sirens.
Wedding Night though shows a folkie ready to adapt his musical-vignettes just enough so that they may earn the attention of the public. If those in attendance do allow him the chance, S. E. Webster will be ready to provide well-written compositions containing interesting storytelling, beautiful melodies, and a hint of some of his great predecessors.
All The Queen`s Horses – Raised By Wolves
I don’t know much about the geography of Ireland. I would assume it’s pretty green and hilly. Not sure how many deserts they go lying around. All The Queen`s Horses’ Sean Murphy seems about as Irish as Dublin, James Joyce, and liver failure.
Still, Raised By Wolves manages to project the very heart of the desert in sonic form. It reminds me of another Irishman, the Edge, and the tweedling of the volume knobs on his pedals that brought us some of the most convincing sounds of nothingness a guitar has ever spoken.
Perhaps it is fitting. Raised By Wolves is the sound of loneliness and abandonment. It’s a song filled with tension and poetry. It also happens to be a tune tailored to the production fashion of the time with electronic elements constantly pushing and shoving the tune—a great work of folktronica and another love-letter for the great deserts of our imagination.
