“Lost my heart between sheets of lightening / Been singing you this song inside a bubble / Lying in your attic / I can feel your static” are just a few of the perceptual lyrics to the opening number off of Stornoway’s debut album, Beachcomber’s Windowsill. Named after the Hebirdean town on the Scottish isle of Lewis, the band’s name, one assumes, relates to their preoccupation with the mythical folklore associated with such an isolated place. Anchored by cello, keyboards, trumpets, and violins, these Oxford musicians sit comfortably in the popularized pop-folk genre, which has recently simmered to the surface thanks to the success of bands like Dirty Projectors, Guillemots, and of course, Fleet Foxes.
Lead singer, Brian Briggs, Stornoway’s mastermind looks and sounds like an early Hank Williams, with the lyrical adventure of Huckleberry Finn. Making his way through numbers about fish species, and ornithological matters (“Watching Birds”), Stornoway are unique because of their unabashed ability to meld these niche topics, with accessible matters of the heart. If such lyrical, and sonic amalgamations sound peculiar, then one need look no further than Briggs’ biography, where it is noted that he attained his PhD in the habits of Shoveler ducks.
PopMatters, 2010
From CD to MP3: The Degradation of Music Curating
In 1999, on the eve of PopMatters’ inception, I was an angst-ridden teenager, who had a tendency for ditching classes only to sit in the toilet reading back issues of Rolling Stone. By the end of the decade, my love for grunge music had sent me searching through expanses that spanned Punk & New Wave to classic rock, gospel, and soul.
But despite my obsession with the retrospective milieu, I was always conscious that I was, of all things, a product of the ‘90s. As such, the world mythologized in the pages of music magazines about vinyl records, played on analogue players was something that I believed, belonged to my forefathers. Certainly, the rickety sound of a spindle scratching the surface of an old record was romantic, and the large artwork was appealing—but nevertheless, I was a staunch believer in the compact disc (CD). With its plastic shell, artwork, and liner notes, the CD had all the positive bearings of an old gramophone disc, except they were portable. This isn’t too mention, the shimmering and ‘untouchable’, optical surface intrinsic to every CD—for a music aficionado like myself there was something quixotic about this; it felt like music was sacred. It was something worth protecting.
Keep on Reading…
Pop Matters, Special Feature: PopMatters@10, 2009
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