Dundee, as everyone
knows, is on the up. With much of central Dundee having been
flattened and turned into a series of building sites over the last
couple of years, and with developments such as the forthcoming V&A
design museum looming at the dock-side, Tayside's
would be European Capital of Culture 2023 is in the throes of
reinvention.
ends
In response,
Dundee-born Andrew Wasylyk takes a wander around his home town in the
form of eight impressionistic instrumentals that create a wistful
psycho-graphic portrait of a time and place caught somewhere between
past, present and future. Such a line of inquiry is a far cry from
Mitchell's tenure as front-person of country-tinged alt-pop outfit
the Hazey Janes. His stint as bassist with a rejuvenated
Idlewild too is not obvious grounding for such a leap. Mitchell has
previous form with atmospheric ambience, however, by way of the
dreamy electro space pop of Art of Memory
Palace, the duo he formed with Raz Ullah to record the 2015 This
Life is But A Passing Dream album. The
same year, Mitchell made his debut as Andrew Wasylyk, taking his
surname from a Ukrainian uncle for the
vocal evocations of his first album, Soroky.
For this follow-up,
Wasylyk shops strictly local, as indicated by the cover image, a
black and white cityscape at dusk by Joseph
McKenzie, the late London-born photographer and lecturer at Duncan of
Jordanstone College of Art. The shadow of McKenzie's 1966 series,
Dundee – A City in Transition,
hangs heavy here.
The opening Drift
creaks in with a jaunty piano-led skip across
the sights before stern Salvation Army style horns suggest a stern
no-go area as guitar twangs make a break for the playground. Wasylyk
describes the following Under High Blue
Skies as an 'ode to brutalism',
and it retains a propulsive sense of wonder as the horns mellow out.
Vic Cricis
slows the pace even more for a lush horn-led perambulation.
The lights dim to
something even eerier for Ghosts of Park
Place, where children can be heard
playing in the middle distance over brooding and insistent layers of
sound that grow woozy as the memories blur into
one another. The mood continues on Come
The Autumn, on which a plaintive
trumpet seems to sound the last post on the rough and tumble of
Wasylyk's unreconstructed boulevard of broken dreams.
The juxtaposition of
electric guitar and treated keyboard patterns on Lower
Dens Works could be the soundtrack to a
post 1960s ITC TV drama, a melancholy jumble of aspiration,
reflection and grown-up disappointment. Think Albert Finney's Charlie
Bubbles character making a prodigal's return to a bombed-out Salford
in a white Rolls Royce. Menzieshill
is even more insular, its solitary piano eventually given weight and
depth by electronic textures and a mournful and utterly British brass
sound. Finally, The Howff swells
up as if an entire industrial landscape is being ripped from its
foundations and a lifetime's memories are demolished.
With the whole thing
clocking in at just over twenty minutes, the record's mix of languor,
nostalgia and Proustian sense memories at times recalls the stark
classicism of Harold Budd's Children on
the Hill or Virginia Astley's
evocation of an English summer on From
Gardens Where We Feel Secure. The dark
atmospherics of Bill Nelson's early ambient work are there too. As
Wasylyk peers forever into the distance, however, a very personal
view emerges in a place where shadows appear to be the only thing
that's left.
Product, May 3rd 2017
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