Also this issue:

Random House
The Twin Atlas’ curious methods and haphazard road map to rock.
-Brian Howard

The Nut Never Sleeps
-Sam Adams

Melt Banana
-Paul Burress

Tom Tom Club
-A.D. Amorosi

DJ Buck
-Sean O’Neal

Mary Lee's Corvette
-Nicole Pensiero

Yerba Buena
-A.D. Amorosi

The Gossip
-M.J. Fine

July 10-16, 2003

musicpicks

Alexi Murdoch

by Nicole Pensiero

For a guy with just a four-song EP in his discography -- the aptly titled Four Songs -- Scottish singer/songwriter Alexi Murdoch is stirring up plenty of attention.

Considered by some to be the second coming of another folk-based Brit, Nick Drake -- who died in 1974 of an apparent suicide when Murdoch was all of 2 years old -- Murdoch didn't even discover Drake's music until recently. "Then I listened to him for six months straight," he says.

While Murdoch can't hear the vocal similarities as clearly as his fans, he says there are some uncanny parallels in his and Drake's upbringings, but with a major difference: "I managed to not be so depressed."

What ultimately links them together, the 30-year-old singer says, is the indefinable influence of growing up in the sun-deprived U.K. "That weather, the unrelenting rain, adds a sort of melancholy tone to things," Murdoch says. "It finds its way to the songs."

He first picked up a guitar in his late teens, around the same time he left Scotland to attend Duke University, which, oddly enough, accepted him without the benefit of a high school diploma. Murdoch played a bit of music around campus ("mostly in my room"), but figured he'd end up a fiction or movie writer.

After graduation, he followed a long-since-gone girlfriend to L.A., scraping by doing TV and radio voiceovers (which he still does) and playing music on the side. Nic Harcourt, host of the nationally syndicated radio show Morning Becomes Eclectic caught one of Murdoch's gigs and started championing the understated Four Songs. Before long, the uber-teen drama Dawson's Creek picked up the gorgeous ballad "Orange Sky" and the buzz began in earnest.

Unsigned to a record label (though being feverishly courted by several), Murdoch plans to self-release the album he's currently recording and perhaps shop it around "when the time feels right."

"This isn't about selling records; it's about making music that people can make a personal connection with," he says. "So, what matters at the end of my day is the value of the songs."

Tue., July 15, 8:30 p.m., $12, The Tin Angel, 20 S. Second St., 215-928-0978; Sat., July 19, 12:30-9 p.m., $5-$15, WXPN Singer Songwriter Weekend, with Kathleen Edwards, Nickel Creek, Townhall, easmountainsouth and Robert Randolph, Great Plaza, Penn’s Landing, www.xpn.org; Fri., July 25, 7 and 10 p.m. $12-$15, with Eliot Bronson, The Point, 880 W. Lancaster Ave., Bryn Mawr, 610-527-0988.