Recorded in five days at a converted fruit packing shed outside Dundee, Salt Year is the quietest loud record you are likely to hear this autumn. There are no synthetic pads and no vocal tuning; when a guitar string buzzes against a fret wire in the chorus of “Gallows Bank”, it stays there.
Singer and songwriter Euan Maclean spent three years writing what he calls “songs for empty halls”, but the arrangements here are anything but spare. Harmonium, bowed bass and a second guitar that seems permanently on the verge of collapsing into feedback give the record its peculiar, gravitational weight.
We wanted the room to be a member of the band. If you shut all the noise out, you shut the feeling out too.
Euan Maclean
The standout remains “Cormorant”, a seven-minute ballad that builds from a single finger-picked acoustic guitar to an unhurried, storm-cloud crescendo. It is an extraordinary piece of work from a band who appear entirely uninterested in current trends.
Play “Salt Year”
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Listen to Salt Year
