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State River Widening - Cottonhead
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Year :: 2004
Label :: Vertical Form
Cat No :: VFORM037CD
Genre :: Post Rock
Tracks :: 10
Size :: 60,5 MB
Source :: CDDA
Bitrate :: VBRKBps
Rel. Date :: 16/10/2004
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Recorded, once again, at London's secretive Keep Calm
studios, Cottonhead is the next step in State River
Widening's steadily evolving voyage that began with
the acoustic guitar and drum vistas of their
eponymous 1999 debut album and which blossomed into
last year's melody-saturated "Early Music". All
who've heard it agree: Cottonhead is SRW's most
potent and accessible album to date. Fans of the
band's previous work will immediately warm to
Cottonead's rich blend of acoustic and electric
guitars, earthy strings, harpsichords, electric
pianos, organs and more - all of it in service of an
unstinting litany of melodic intrigues. Indeed, fans
of anything from Nick Drake to Cluster via Boards Of
Canada, Four Tet and Rachel's will find treasures
aplenty here. Completely free of rock cliche,
over-familiar digital gestures or dreary avant-garde
naval-gazing, whether it be the delicate violin and
guitar traceries of "Touched", "Cottonwood's"
spiraling chordal cascades, "Desertesque's" marimba
shimmers or the cinematic sweep of "Knifegrinder's
Song" (a track partly recorded in a street in
Valencia, Spain), this is an album which simply
refutes easy pigeonholing. And just to add to the
spectacle, slivers of vocals make themselves heard
more keenly than on any previous SRW album. ThatÆs
reclusive `60s folk legend Anne Briggs lending her
dreamy, elegiac tones to the hypnotic Lowlands.
Oh,and if all of this didn't quite manage to give you
a clear idea of the band's inspired soundscaping, you
might like to know that you'll most likely have
already been made familiar with SRW's other-worldly
sound. "Desertesque" has been the soundtrack to those
"what to do in an emergency" adverts the government
has been feeding us over the last couple of months.
so there you have it, more proof that this is music
to take existential comfort from - and how many
records could you say that about
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[01] State River Widening - Crown [02:13]
[02] State River Widening - Touched [03:16]
[03] State River Widening - Cottonwood [04:49]
[04] State River Widening - Lowlands [04:59]
[05] State River Widening - Knifegrider's Song [06:15]
[06] State River Widening - Desertesque [03:51]
[07] State River Widening - Cottonhead 1 [02:03]
[08] State River Widening - Madder Hues [08:09]
[09] State River Widening - Unspinning [05:04]
[10] State River Widening - Cottonhead 2 [02:04]
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UK Independent