One day I’ll make a film – just so I can have Andrew Morgan write the score. A proper score, like they used to make. His beautifully cinematic music will trail our hero through an autumnal Paris as he outwits his enemies and gets his gal. In the mean time, this will do just fine.
As Long As We’re Together is the first single taken from Morgan’s autumnal Please Kid Remember album, released earlier in the year, though with eight tracks it has more of the feel of a mini-album than an E.P. Presumably, these are the tracks which failed to make the final cut for the album. If that’s the case then Andrew Morgan is clearly a man who has hit his musical stride.
The E.P. picks up exactly where the album left off with a blend of breathless euphoria and misty melancholy, awash with sumptuous string arrangements. There isn’t a single moment on here which isn’t simply glorious.
As Long As We’re Together is released by Broken Horse Records on November 16th.
Please Kid Remember is available now.
To find out more about Andrew Morgan read his Suitcase Orchestra Q & A here or visit his MySpace here.
Inside this man's mind lurks the most beautiful music.
If scientists were able to insert probes into trees and record the actual sound of leaves turning from green to gold in Autumn, then those recordings would form the basis for Andrew Morgan’s second album, ‘Please Kid, Remember’. Veering between impossibly pretty and achingly beautiful, Morgan has pieced together a masterful collection of songs and brief instrumentals.
Normally, a seventeen strong track listing would do little to inspire me but this album, which put to use 33 different musicians in 2 different countries, is essentially ten songs, bookended and interspersed with short instrumental pieces which hint at a future in film score work for the Kansas born Morgan. The titles tell their own story: ‘Leaves’; ‘Snow’; ‘Turn Your Collar to the Cold’; ‘First Snow of the Year’. This album isn’t just autumnal, it is Autumn – even the back cover of the album is a photograph of golden leaved trees – there’s a warm glow to it but a hint of coldness to come.
Overall, the album sounds like the product of locking Badly Drawn Boy, Teenage Fanclub and the late Elliott Smith in a studio. Nowhere is this more obvious than on ‘A Gesture Of Love’ which starts like one one of Smith’s jauntier moments before moving into ‘Howdy’ era Fanclub, all with a gloss of Damon Gough’s twinkling over the top and Morgan’s breathy, almost whispered vocals. The introduction to ‘Three Months In Cook County’ is possibly the most beautifully arranged and layered string and piano that I have ever heard, somehow effortlessly combining mournfulness and sparkling prettiness reminiscent of the arrangements which Robert Kirby washed over Nick Drake’s songs on ‘Five Leaves Left’, an album which clearly was somewhere in Andrew Morgan’s mind when he set out to put this album together.
In fact, there was a fair bit in Morgan’s mind when he wrote these songs – his friend Elliott Smith had died, another was institutionalised, he was almost killed by a tornado and his vocal chords were paralysed for three months by an allergic reaction. The recordings were beset by technical problems and sessions had to be repeatedly scrapped and work reconvened elsewhere. This resulted in a five year hiatus since his debut offering, ‘Misadventures In Radiology’, in 2004. Somehow, out of that maelstrom emerged one of the most wonderfully ornate and beautiful records ever. Happily, he is already under way with his third album.
Please Kid, Remember is available to download in the usual places but if you order it on CD through his website, you get a free mini-album, Victory In Passing’ tucked inside too. I can’t tell you what that’s like though as I haven’t been able to stop playing Please Kid, Remember yet.
http://www.myspace.com/morganandrew
