DURUTTI COLUMN - Sunlight To Blue… Blue To Blackness

Since 1978 Vini Reilly, under the moniker Durutti Column, has been irradiating the planet with multiple reverbs and echoes, making music that's somehow both melancholic and sun-drenched at once. This new album confirms a rediscovered compositional vein, favouring an acoustic dimension that is undoubtedly preferable, where Reilly gets the chance to show off his undeniable visionary talent on guitar.

Indeed, it's precisely the electric tracks, like "Never Known Version", decidedly 80s in flavour, that convince far less, coming across mostly as a nostalgic exercise, perhaps intended by Reilly as a "cast-off", an outtake from "LC", his celebrated 1981 album: so we find ourselves pleasantly reassured by the news that Vini's famous Gibson Les Paul was recently sold by the man himself, evidently in financial straits, on eBay to far-eastern shores.

Aside from this, the album opens straight away by offering the listener introspective food for thought with the melancholic "Glimpse", among the best tracks on the record, where an acoustic guitar is treated with the echoes that, after all, are the Durutti Column's "trademark". Also spot-on, though electric, is "So Many Crumbs And Monkeys!", spiced with psychedelia and featuring a Lennon-esque incipit.

"Ananda", on the other hand, is the only track not written by the man himself, but by the very young, talented pianist and vocalist Poppy Morgan (ehm... not to be confused with the English porn star sharing the same opiate-sounding name), to whom the whole album is dedicated; an intimate, almost new age piece, into which Vini injects his guitar with intrusive intent, by his own admission. For "Demo For Gathering Dust", a small acoustic poem, Reilly momentarily switches off his echo machine, and the result is nothing short of surprising.

Another sung track, "Head Glue", features Reilly's echo-drenched guitar acting as a bed, a continuum, for a gentle vocal duet.

An album that is, in any case, more than pleasant and well-judged, predominantly instrumental, one that carries the memory of the somewhat older listener back to one of the most exciting scenes of the '80s and to the sound of Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus's Factory Records.

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22/09/2008