[ Digital Regress / LP ]
Release Date: Friday 27 September 2019
This item is currently out of stock. It may take 6 or more weeks to obtain from when you place your order as this is a specialist product.
A central figure of the New Zealand underground since his days in The Rip over three decades ago, Alastair Galbraith has worked alongside scores of Kiwi legends as a multi-instrumentalist and solo artist.
Galbraith plays almost everything on Morse, with periodic assists from Bruce Russell, Robbie Muir and others. Mutable, unfussy arrangements - for acoustic and electric guitar, piano, violin, and some proper post-VU thudding - gather and crumble around obliquely phrased double-tracked vocals, sharing an enigmatic yet intuitive emotional quality with much NZ music of the period. And while his process might be homespun, don't call this lo-fi: listen close and hear microscopic layers of detail in Galbraith's plangent guitar work, the texture of amplified strings distinct from the notes they're sounding, melodies and sibilant murmurs swallowed as songs melt or careen into one another.
Morse's fragmentary song suites conjure a post-70s in which Syd Barrett fucked off to Dunedin and started roadying for The Clean, or John Cale traded blow for tea and a Tascam. Untouchable in spirit and execution, Morse is a long-undersung gem of the international 90s underground by a bona fide NZ legend.
A1. Screaming E
A2. Time Please
A3. Marcasite Lace
A4. Fall
A5. More Then Magnetic
A6. Hawks
A7. Andalucia
A8. Ivy Bound
A9. My Bottom Line
B1. Bone Idle
B2. Semaphore
B3. Portrait
B4. Lit
B5. Huxley
B6. Vincent
B7. R.D.S.
B8. Stone