Literary and historical references have always been found strewn through Chris Murphy’s music, but rather than weigh down the songs, they are often used as clever metaphors or humorous asides, making for a wonderful blend of wit and wisdom, a sense of gravitas that doesn’t even impede the groove.
“The Defeat of the Spanish Armada,” his latest release under the instrumental project Seven Crows, however, feels slightly different. Although, as always with such pieces, you only ever have the title and the emotive power of the music to guide you, those two elements come together to create what feels like a meditation, perhaps on the nature of empires, their transiency, and how, even the greatest of them eventually crumble to dust.
And the video adds plenty of weight to the fall of that titular empire’s expedition, images of Spanish galleons and desolate shorelines, driftwood and sea mist, a lonely end to a venture born of hubris and aggrandisement. The violin drifts through these mists, ebbing and flowing with the sonic tides, driven by rhythmic pizzicato plucks and coiled within additional sonic loops and musical motifs.
I have probably said it before, but instrumental music is a wondrous thing. Lyrics tend to take the listener by the hand and walk them to the point or conclusion that the artist is trying to make. Instrumental pieces just let the music speak for itself. And whether you end up musing on the Defeat of the Spanish Armada or find yourself contemplating something completely different entirely, at least the music has taken you somewhere, and probably somewhere that you hadn’t planned on going.
Melancholic might not be the word, perhaps nostalgic, but indeed profound, the music drifting back through time, a reminder that even the most enduring civilization is but a blink in the eye of the universe.
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