September 28–October 5, 2000

disc quicks|rock/pop

Movietone

The Blossom Filled Streets

(Drag City)

Images of the sea and the dewy countryside pervade Movietone’s third record, but Rachel Brook and Kate Wright owe little to the sea shanties and Anglo-folk of their coastal Bristol, England. Instead, they capture the sights, the sounds, the smells and the moods of the ocean. Brook spent time in Flying Saucer Attack, contributing to Dave Pearce’s dense "rural psychedelia". But while Brook shares FSA’s gift for experimentation, she and Wright favor less expansive and more acoustic arrangements of guitar, bass, piano and clarinet on The Blossom Filled Streets. Like the band’s sparse, intimate and meandering compositions, Wright’s dusky vocals and diary-drawn lyrics are imperfect, non-linear and phantasmagoric. On "1930s Beach House," after calling out and replying to herself for much of the song, Wright repeats the last pair of lines several times: "There’s fish on the shoreline/candles in the dark night." It’s this subtle combination of familiar and yet colliding elements that’s bewitching. As the lyrics of "Porthcurno" admit: "This sand and these shells are the same as you’ve all seen/But this day is ours for a while." Movietone has created a beautifully fragile record, uncommonly composed of common elements, that thrives on the threshold of death and unknowing, changing seasons.

—Chris Nosal