Alexi Murdoch: Four Songs EP (2002)

(s/r)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Ten years later, this self-issued (on CDBaby!), twenty-minute curio remains Alexi Murdoch's most striking release. Despite its modest origins, it accompanies Murdoch's staunchly traditionalist singing and melodies with surprisingly complete and intelligent arrangements that know precisely when to stop and breathe; the same can't really be said for the polished precision of his subsequent work, as shown clearly by the comparative weakness heard in three of these songs when later rerecorded for a larger audience.

It's somewhat overstated at this point, but still inescapable, that Murdoch is in the Nick Drake mold. Really, he sounds uncannily like Drake at times, to the point that we might think of him as a considerably more well-adjusted version of same. Perhaps the major difference, which has turned on or off his primary audience of pseudo-bohemian art-folkies and people who really loved Away We Go, is what a coy showman he is. Though its populace runs on a parallel to, you know, the real one, this is still essentially populist music in the sense that it gives precisely what one wants when putting it on. There are moments, certainly in my life and I'm sure in many, when nothing sounds more right than these hazy, cloudy, relentlessly pretty and rugged anthems-of-quiet. It's hard to explain how deep this can burrow into you, and not many singer-songwriters of any period could achieve that quite this succinctly.

So as I'm sure I've posited before, all this time-stopping, introspective intensity is very likely a put-on because Murdoch knows it works, but that doesn't change that last bit: it works, and he's great at it. This brief record is masterfully paced, to boot, not just in the dive-and-wallow-and-emerge run of the songs but within each of them. There's something mildly magic to the way that the tension of "Blue Mind" never quite breaks, that each half climaxes with a carefully arranged catharsis in which something warm and persuasive and familiar breaks out of everything. At the end there's that humming whispering final act of "Song for You," but my single favorite moment in all of Murdoch's recorded output is that open-armed, humbled, breathlessly direct and resigned "my salvation lies in your love" chorus on this original recording of "Orange Sky." It feels right and true to me, an undramatic evocation of exactly what it says, and it gets me every time.

[SEE ALSO:]
Time without Consequence (2006)