JOHN MURRY – THE GRACELESS AGE
2012 – Bucketful of Brains
4****
Review written by Paul Hinkley Smith
The first thing to stand out for me when I picked this up is that it was produced by Murry and Tim Mooney , drummer from American Music Club and Sun Kil Moon who passed away recently. I wondered if this may have been the last or one of the last recordings he worked on. As AMC are one of my favourite bands of all time this in itself made this worth a spin and might have even slightly prejudiced my view towards the positive. Anyone who knows me will tell you and as you read more of my reviews you will realise that I am not given to spontaneous outbursts of sentimentality so I reckon my objectivity is intact. The production stands out as each track seems to be built with layers upon layers. You can almost still hear the stripped down versions that each track must have started out as because there are times when there is little more than a laconic vocal and just piano or acoustic guitar sat there in the mix. Chuck Prophet also appears on the album and you can pick out his guitar
playing here and there throughout the album. Lots to interest me as a listener.
This recording was four years in the making. From Tupelo Mississippi originally but now living in Oakland the other side of the bay from San Francisco, Murry took this recording from San Francisco to Memphis during its genesis . It was then mastered in North Mississippi. The first track on the album, The Ballad of The Pajama Kid (sic) contains William Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech. You can’t get more Southern Gothic than William Faulkner but the vocal kind of sits half way between southern drawl and California slacker. There is this contrast running throughout the album, simply in the track titles that go neatly from California
to Southern Sky as if to illustrate the point.
The album is littered with drug references like a tower block stairwell, a paean to hard times and hard living. Little Colored Balloons isn’t a reference to balloon animals at kid’s parties. ¿No
te da ganas de reir, Sènor Malverde? repeats the refrain “What keeps me alive is gonna kill me in the end” a sentiment any addict or someone who has spent a lot of time in the darker places that life takes you to would recognise instantly. I wondered if there was an element of catharsis in putting this album together for Murry. Loss, regret and guilt run through it, never more so than on If I’m To Blame. May be it is my own demons that make me like the album so much. All in all it seems like a triumph in the face of adversity and we all need to be reminded that those triumphs are possible
sometimes.
http://johnmurry.net
4****
Review written by Paul Hinkley Smith
The first thing to stand out for me when I picked this up is that it was produced by Murry and Tim Mooney , drummer from American Music Club and Sun Kil Moon who passed away recently. I wondered if this may have been the last or one of the last recordings he worked on. As AMC are one of my favourite bands of all time this in itself made this worth a spin and might have even slightly prejudiced my view towards the positive. Anyone who knows me will tell you and as you read more of my reviews you will realise that I am not given to spontaneous outbursts of sentimentality so I reckon my objectivity is intact. The production stands out as each track seems to be built with layers upon layers. You can almost still hear the stripped down versions that each track must have started out as because there are times when there is little more than a laconic vocal and just piano or acoustic guitar sat there in the mix. Chuck Prophet also appears on the album and you can pick out his guitar
playing here and there throughout the album. Lots to interest me as a listener.
This recording was four years in the making. From Tupelo Mississippi originally but now living in Oakland the other side of the bay from San Francisco, Murry took this recording from San Francisco to Memphis during its genesis . It was then mastered in North Mississippi. The first track on the album, The Ballad of The Pajama Kid (sic) contains William Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech. You can’t get more Southern Gothic than William Faulkner but the vocal kind of sits half way between southern drawl and California slacker. There is this contrast running throughout the album, simply in the track titles that go neatly from California
to Southern Sky as if to illustrate the point.
The album is littered with drug references like a tower block stairwell, a paean to hard times and hard living. Little Colored Balloons isn’t a reference to balloon animals at kid’s parties. ¿No
te da ganas de reir, Sènor Malverde? repeats the refrain “What keeps me alive is gonna kill me in the end” a sentiment any addict or someone who has spent a lot of time in the darker places that life takes you to would recognise instantly. I wondered if there was an element of catharsis in putting this album together for Murry. Loss, regret and guilt run through it, never more so than on If I’m To Blame. May be it is my own demons that make me like the album so much. All in all it seems like a triumph in the face of adversity and we all need to be reminded that those triumphs are possible
sometimes.
http://johnmurry.net