It’s easy to pole vault into the New Year with internal promises of rejuvenation and working like a machine; of being impermeable to outside influence, shielded by new resolve. To state the obvious, it rarely lasts – you can’t just pluck that strength from thin air. On ‘Distant Man’, the opening number to Falmouth-based duo Red River Dialect‘s gorgeous new album, David Morris knows well the difficulties of extricating oneself from stagnation, singing, “some things don’t clear, like trapped condensation, if they’re not given access to air / It’s a painful operation, letting it go, resisting fascination, letting winds blow.”
Perhaps akin to Callahan in lyrical deftness (“he stayed for two days without saying thank you, when I left I still wished he would go” is another choice line), his delivery occasionally flares with a recognisably Smog-y twang, but for the most part, he pointedly sings in his local brogue, a handsome blend of matter-of-fact dejection sung with a friendly raised brow. By the end of the song, however, he’s sparring with Simon Drinkwater’s increasingly heftily strummed electric; previously a warm, embered presence firing the song along, it eventually converges with Dave’s voice, its triple-metered verse leading the fevered waltz towards familiar inevitability.
Red River Dialect: ‘Distant Man’
Buy Red River Dialect’s album for the handsome price of six English pounds here: http://redriverdialect.bandcamp.com/
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