At Swim Two Birds - Diary of a Sentimental Killer

A complex artistic personality with an unusual sensitivity, Roger Quigley has for a decade now been one of the most lucid English voices in a broadly singer-songwriter tradition that finds its core, its inspiration and even its ultimate purpose in a poetics of abandonment and defeat, expressed in music through stories and human emotions.

It's this mood, filtered through a mature disenchantment and a thirst for understanding that goes well beyond the purely musical, that characterises his various artistic ventures, from his early work under the name Quigley to his current project At Swim Two Birds, passing through the long-standing artistic partnership with Mark Tranmer that produced the three precious Montgolfier Brothers records, admirable examples of grace, feeling and compositional refinement.

Quigley's artistic path, however inseparably tied to and strongly shaped by his Montgolfier Brothers years, actually stretches back further, and it's no coincidence that it now proves capable of carrying the creative and intellectual weight of a venture that originally arose out of the great artistic freedom he and Tranmer chose to grant themselves with their respective side projects away from the Montgolfier Brothers, but which has since become stable enough to focus his energy and commitment for the future.

For those who have only known Quigley through the Montgolfier Brothers or, more recently, through At Swim Two Birds, it may come as a surprise that his earliest artistic steps were tied, beyond a small record label (Croissant Neuf, founded together with a childhood friend), to a musical formula quite different from the one that would go on to define all his later work. His first recorded output, dating back to 1996 with the EP A Kind Of Loving and the 10" Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year (the latter in an unusual double-A-side split edition with Lazerboy), presents a still-green songwriter, tentative in his vocal delivery and even more uncertain about the musical dress for his songs; alongside fragments of delicate intimism, they instead contain traces of romantic pop songwriting built on synthetic backing, now fluid, now urgent, in which Quigley's understated spirit and his gift for writing and communicating are already perceptible.

Two years later came his first album, again released under the name Quigley, titled 1969 Til God Knows When…, which gathers as many as thirteen tracks, through which the English songwriter's class and his extraordinary ability to narrate simple stories begins to take clearer shape, stories told with remarkable grace by his voice and by equally simple guitar chords that, through their delicate repetitions, sketch out gloomy sonic and emotional landscapes.

Compared to the EPs, the step forward is decisive, even if the drum machine still lingers in many tracks, rhythmically underpinning the already dominant themes of distant memories, missed opportunities and surrender to a condition of loneliness, examined in all its facets and savoured almost like a glass of wine in the opening "How Things Were Meant To Be", whose lyrics and muffled atmosphere, caught between acoustic guitar and electronic pulse, can be considered an integral part of Quigley's artistic manifesto.

If the author's stamp is already clear from the very first track, the whole album follows similar lines, moving between unvarnished portraits of emotional inertia ("Laziness", "If I Could Fly", "My Luck Is Turning") and moments of greater lightness, both in content and music. Where the former is dominated by a shadowy mood, built chiefly around slender acoustic textures with occasionally bucolic contours, in the latter Quigley indulges in various sonic digressions, only partly tied to the near synth-pop forays already hinted at in the previous EP. The electronics, always "cheap" and bare-bones, are used not only to underpin the melodies but also to filter his voice into something almost goth on "Six Months Have Passed" and to create a sense of claustrophobic obsession on the dark "Obsessed" and "Sahara" (the latter even edges toward improbable ethno-jungle sounds!). Alongside these, Quigley shows further sides of his inspiration, including the unpredictable electric lo-fi of "Mr. Inbetween", the decadent spirit à la Morrissey on "A Kind Of Loving", and the minimalist experimentalism of the fourteen minutes of whispers and scattered piano notes that close the album on "Single's Night".

Though still artistically uneven, 1969 Til God Knows When… proves to be a rich, multifaceted work that, through its many angles, reveals a complex artistic personality already well defined in the traits that would go on to characterise it. And it is precisely this sonic variety, together with his distinctive compositional and vocal approach, that leaves little room for easy comparison: even though Quigley shows himself to be, to some extent, indebted to the British wave experience of the previous two decades, his authentic and original "spirit" resists any single pigeonhole, placing him neither among the ranks of intellectually inflected pop artists, nor simply among singer-songwriters.

His finest stylistic achievement as a songwriter and acoustic guitarist, already evident on this record, soon became his favoured mode of artistic practice, first on the subsequent singles The Vespertine and In Bed With Your Best Friend, and then throughout his collaboration with Mark Tranmer, to which he would devote all his efforts in the years that followed, giving rise to the splendid "Seventeen Stars" in 1999 and to "The World Is Flat" in 2002.

Soon after, Quigley, now matured as a songwriter and musician through the two albums with the Montgolfier Brothers, returned to running an entirely personal artistic project, this time approached from a rather different perspective than his uncertain early days. It's a new beginning, also marked by the distinctive choice of a new alias, At Swim Two Birds, which Roger took from the title of a novel by Flann O'Brian, for the twofold reason of its closeness to his own view of Ireland and for the curious resonance and equally curious meaning of the title.

The symbolic importance of this collection of ten new songs, even though written over a rather long period, is evident right from the album's title, Quigley's Point, that is, a new starting point for both the man and the artist. While the tenor of Quigley's inspiration had already been clearly outlined in his earliest work, by his own admission this record defines his poetics even more sharply, turning it toward the past, toward memories of broken relationships, private regret and the awareness of an unchanging yet bittersweet melancholy from which his sensitivity and prickly character can never free him. All the songs on Quigley's Point were in fact written about a nameless girl, whose wounded spirit Quigley says he wanted to soothe, only to end up deepening it instead, right up to the inevitable breakup and her final letter, set to music here in the moving "I Need Him". Quigley's Point is, precisely, an analysis of that story from his own perspective, an exercise he himself describes as a dissection of lived experience, a way of metabolising it through songwriting, the only tool available to him for returning, after the fact, to what might have been and never was.

This spirit, which finds incisive and almost desperate expression in the tense crescendo of the closing "Things We'll Never Do", hovers over every track on the album, each shaped by delicate autumnal sounds and marked by the incremental repetition of muffled acoustic chords that, set against the nostalgic emotional desolation of the lyrics, instead instill a sense of serenity. From the faint rays of sunlight in the instrumentals "Women Of A Certain Mental Age" and "Swedish Lakes" to pieces of aching introspection such as "Little White Lies" and the magnificent "Close To", the iteration of a few guitar notes gives rise to lulling melodies, imbued with a fragile grace capable of easing the soul's suffering through music.

Although the spirit remains unchanged, little is left of the electronic character of earlier works on Quigley's Point, attested only by the steady rhythm of "Darling", which nonetheless dissolves into an overriding harmonic context, while Quigley's declared emotional involvement in the lyrics also fuels his growth as an interpreter, now filtered through a more assured and, in a sense, "adult" voice that, without any stylistic excess, adds engagement and depth to the songs.

With the debut album of At Swim Two Birds now behind them, Quigley and Tranmer go back to working together as the Montgolfier Brothers, producing two more exceptional works in 2005: the mini-album "Journey's End" and the following full-length "All Of My Bad Thoughts".

By now Quigley can be said to have reached full maturity and a complete artistic identity, marked by the perfect union of the sweet suffering of his melancholy mood with soft, crepuscular melodies, built from small acoustic sounds and refined, never intrusive arrangements.

In light of his recent experiences and renewed artistic persona, Quigley decides to revisit his past repertoire, subjecting some of his old songs to the melancholic, nostalgic treatment typical of his recent output. Roger Quigley thus returns "to the scene of the crime", singing of the persistent fallacy of human feelings, of regret for missed opportunities and guilt over broken promises, all clearly expressed through the sonic coordinates of the new album.

Having shed the more pop-leaning ambitions that marked their original versions, the songs on Returning To The Scene Of The Crime… are brought back to life wrapped in spare instrumentation, where guitar is the sole counterpart to the whispering voice. And yet, right from the extraordinary opener "In Bed With Your Best Friend", it's clear that the album, though slow and reflective, is never static: the emotional crescendo running through the long opening track draws the listener in completely to the sound of At Swim Two Birds, ensuring that, despite no major shifts in rhythm or style, the tracklist of Returning To The Scene Of The Crime… never feels repetitive or dull.

The elegance of the songwriting and the emotional depth achieved in tracks like "The Smell Of Suntan Oil On Your Skin" or the title track, where a synth bed and delicate electronic drums ripple through the flow of Roger's confessions, reveal the author's ability to translate into music those delicate, intangible feelings that are usually lost in the daily noise that surrounds us.

Guitar is still the dominant presence in the subsequent chapters of this manual on the workings of the human heart, and tracks like "Down By The Stream", "Laziness And The Lack Of The Right Medication" and the harrowing "Wine Destroys The Memory" cannot help but strike, with their intense lyricism, the deepest chords of the listener's soul, offering shining examples of Quigley's poetics, of extraordinary intensity yet at the same time spare, simple, almost reticent.

With this work, less jarring and more polished than the debut, yet undoubtedly more mature and just as heartfelt, At Swim Two Birds crafted a masterpiece of understatement, proving how outstanding songwriting skill combined with an uncommon gift for interpretation can work wonders.

After the sharp reworkings of old songs, two years later it's time for a new album of original material, one in which the poetic urgency that has always defined Quigley's work becomes even more pressing, as on Before You Left Roger asks his listeners to plunge, with no rope and no safety net, into an abyss of desolation and melancholy.

The whole album unfolds as a kind of concept work, narrating the sensations and feelings of a man deeply marked by loss. A loss, however, not caused by the end of a relationship, but by something more inevitable and final: the death of the person he loved.

The record offers a chronicle, raw and free of false sentimentality, of a loss and the resulting condition of loneliness, shaping a work that, in its narrative and musical unfolding alike, traces a kind of personal epic. From the "Intro", in which the protagonist sings, a cappella, "Before you left/ I told myself it is a good thing…", a narrative unfolds through the bittersweet memories of a long life spent together.

In a succession of surrenders to despair and flashes of pride and vitality, culminating in the drowning of sorrows in the martial, classically-styled "The March Of The Kings", the protagonist's torment translates into songs with an inevitably subdued, nostalgic mood, in which Quigley's merciless self-analysis nonetheless manages to take on an almost cathartic function, as though keeping the past clearly in view might somehow help exorcise it and shake off its ghosts.

The arc of the narrative is faithfully mirrored in the nuances provided by an aching crescendo of performances that are more expressive and eclectic than in the past, and by a notable variety of arrangements and sonic settings, which alongside guitar, dark-toned keyboards and a measured use of electronics, now feature the steady presence in At Swim Two Birds of young cellist Sophia Lockwood, whose contribution duly heightens the record's most romantic and pathos-laden moments.

An aching, at times painful work, Before You Left once again reveals an inspired, sincere artist, bordering on rawness, once more the perfect interpreter of human defeat, for which At Swim Two Birds' music would be the ideal soundtrack. A defeat that, mind you, brings with it no anger or desire for vindication, but quiet, sober despair, a fatalistic resignation to an adverse destiny that is nonetheless accepted, almost with tenderness and pleasure.

Contributions by Francesco Amoroso ("Returning To The Scene Of The Crime…", "Before You Left")

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