You might recognize “The Albatross Song,” but if you have heard it before, it will undoubtedly be in a more raw and raucous form as the opener to E.G. Phillips second album, At Home At Sea. Here, he offers us a radical and imaginative reworking of that song, smoothing its edges and polishing its heart, taking it out of those more abrasive realms and turning it into a chamber-pop/musical theatre hybrid place.
The artist admits that this stripping back brings the song closer to its protean state, and you can now hear the echo of the lilting cowboy campfire sound that helped shape it.
But now, the space created by the toning down of sound allows room for delicate stings to spin and spiral through, cellos to brood, and violins flit by underpinning the more raggle-taggle groove that runs across the top—a mercurial blend of the classical and the rootsy, the graceful and the groovy.
The song is then soaked in ethereal cosmic folk harmonies and ebb and flows between these musical extremes to create something genuinely odd, magnificent, magnificently odd…and oddly magnificent!
Sometimes, words don’t cut it when describing music to the potential listener. Maybe you should ignore my ham-fisted attempts to explain what’s happening here, ( all the best songs defy apt description anyway) give the record a spin, and make up your mind. (Maybe I should have opened with that!)
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