ARTIST: Hobotalk
TITLE: Homesick For Nowhere
LABEL: Glitterhouse Records
GENRE: Indie
TIME: 47:42 min
SIZE: 57,2 MB
RIP DATE: May-13-2007
RELEASE DATE: May-07-2007
WEBSITE: n/a
Track List:
01. Homesick Pt. 1 00:40
02. There Times Sure Could Break Your Heart 02:58
03. How It Is 03:04
04. Dream On 03:49
05. Homesick Pt. 2 00:33
06. Setting Fire To Flame 04:03
07. Fallin' For You Again 03:40
08. People Keep On 04:35
09. Homesick Pt. 3 00:36
10. Between The Graveyard And Your Door 03:06
11. Life Looks Better 04:21
(Looking At It Through You)
12. Doesn't Life Go On 03:40
13. Homesick Pt. 4 00:13
14. Me Myself 03:43
15. Today 04:19
16. Homesick Pt. 5 00:21
17. Don't Say Goodbye 04:01
Release Notes:
It's 7am, the kitchen is littered with broken
cutlery and half drunk cups of tea. A Tom Waits
record scratches away quietly in the living room,
and hunched over an old tape recorder in his
bedroom, Marc Pilley, the singer/songwriter and
creative force behind the Scottish outfit Hobotalk,
is working on a new tune. Playing back the tape is
like listening to his diary entries; candid musings
on life, love and loss, set to the hiss of tape and
warbling guitar plucked into a cheap microphone,
that speak straight to the soul. It's an apt
picture, when considering the band's recently
released 3rd album, Homesich For Nowhere, an
intimate and sparsely produced collection of songs
that has the homegrown feel of a band playing right
in your very bedroom.
" I wanted the vocals to sound like I was singing
over the listeners shoulder. Simple and direct, with
every little noise in its dusty place."
Homesickà is a deceptively unassuming record. Songs
of lovelorn beauty and humanity, pared down
instrumentally to the bare bones of the message, in
a manner reminiscent of the way that Raymond Carver
writes short stories. Piano and acoustic guitars
create the key motifs, interweaving with close
harmonies and heartrending melodies. Some of the
songs, are almost haunting, others tell timeless and
instantly recognizable themes of redemption; but
resonant throughout the album is Pilley's frank
lyric and yearning vocal. And what a voice! "There
is no-one in contemporary music with a voice quite
like Pilley's" quoted The Times newspaper. Like the
illegitimate lovechild of Thom Yorke and Joni
Mitchell, Pilley's vocal range and timbre is truly
captivating, yet his words come direct from the
heart.
But it has been a long and ongoing journey since the
release of their debut album "Beauty in Madness" in
2000. Received to much critical acclaim, it was
short listed for the Mercury Music Prize nominations
and listed in The Times top 20 albums of that year.
The intervening years saw turmoil with the record
label, and changes both in Pilley's life and his
band, but the one thing that remained constant was
his prolific musical output. And while the image of
him recording into a tape machine at dawn could be
cynically dismissed as some sort of romantic
publicity spin, it is actually how he works. As a
songwriter, Pilley is something of a workaholic.
Almost an obsessive. And not out of obligation, but
out of a pure, driven need to create.
"My first choice of instrument has always been my
acoustic guitar. Story, lyric, guitar and voice in
the age old tradition of a few chords and the truth.
I feel like I've come in from the cold, havinÆ
travelled physically and emotionally threw many
storms. I gather all my memories and ghosts and
first put them onto paper as little prose. Poems,
stories. I guess to me personally my hurt will
always remain somewhere in the pit of my stomach,
you just have to learn how to locate it, especially
when writing."
Hobotalk refuse to be pigeonholed into any
particular musical genre. Their uncluttered
instrumentation has drawn comparisons to early Tim
Hardin. Live, they build a dynamic and swagger
reminiscent of The Band.