SMALL TOWN BOREDOM - Notes From The Infirmary

Barely two years after their striking debut, "Autumn Might Have Hope", the Scottish duo of Fraser McGowan and Colin Morrison returns with a second chapter in their chronicle of the greyness and sense of abandonment that run through their music and through the very name Small Town Boredom.

True to the understatement already on full display on the debut, "Notes From The Infirmary" arrives almost unannounced, without so much as a word from the label (the excellent Trome, aka The Remains Of My Estate), itself coming off a lengthy period of dormancy.

Yet over these two and a half years something seems to have shifted, at least on an aesthetic and formal level, in the catatonic sound sketches of a duo that masterfully combines melodic linearity, Barzin-esque narcolepsy and homemade recording methods. First of all, this time the album is released in a carefully crafted CD edition, rather than the limited vinyl-only run of "Autumn Might Have Hope"; and, above all, it marks a significant change in expression and songwriting. Where the previous record posed as an articulated narrative of fourteen tracks with varying moods and lengths, "Notes From The Infirmary" compresses into six songs the next stage of those disillusioned autumn hopes, whispered with dreamy grace and gentle melancholy: the winter of a spirit worn down by life, seeking relief from its sufferings in music.

It is no coincidence that among the lyrics carried by the gradually building melody of "Song For Matthew Leonard" are spare messages of loss and regret, accounts of sleepless nights gripped by detachment, eased only slightly by the dialogue between acoustic arpeggios and enveloping lo-fi loops, which turns more fluid and decisive.

That opening "calling card" already makes the album's sonic character fairly clear: an invariably subdued mood, yet one wrapped in a comforting embrace of intimate, muffled atmospheres, to which the post-mastering work of Mark "Rothko" Beazley has undoubtedly made a fundamental contribution. Granular field recordings and acoustic silences played in slow motion are interspersed here and there throughout the album, with tones and reverbs that frame sepia-toned melodies, sometimes with a heavy step, in a dreamy, misty aura (particularly on "Black Cart Ways").

Tapes drift serenely in the background, alongside murky sighs, instilling a certain unease into acoustic delicacies and occasional vocal interweaving ("Void Lighting"). Yet the spleen of Small Town Boredoms still has an almost sweet flavour, like the serene acceptance of a condition born from one's own sensitivity: far more contemplative than turbulent, given the slow/sad-core register chosen to convey it. The only departure from this latent tension is the minute of electric spasm at the end of "Worlds Most Unwanted", which crowns, with a strangled scream (!), a song built from a steady piano, rhythmic twists, a quasi post-rock crescendo and progressive suspensions of time, stretched into complete silence before the abrupt, unpredictable explosion.

And yet, even here the duo does not lose its melodic impressionism, which becomes deliciously drowsy again over the indietronica beats of the closing "Moments For Denial", bringing the record to its end as Fraser sings, unperturbed, "I never wanted this to end", thus closing the circle of the nostalgic sense of loss that runs through the spare but accomplished output of Small Town Boredoms. And who knows whether the difficulty of facing things that come to an end might not be reflected, to some degree, in the extreme conciseness of "Notes From The Infirmary", a record that finishes its run just past the half-hour mark, leaving the impression of a new, admirable effort from the Paisley duo, whose rediscovered linearity and brevity more than adequately offset the apparently lesser immediacy of songs shaped as small miniatures hidden in the shadows.

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02/12/2010