Album Review: Halfway Towards A Healing, Lost Brothers

A chance meeting at a house party in Liverpool in 2007 changed the lives of Oisin Leech and Mark McCausland. Discovering a mutual love of melancholy music, the former songwriters with The 747s and The Basement have spent the following 11 years travelling the world, recording with the likes of Brendan Benson, Old Crow Medicine Show, The Cardinals and Richard Hawley’s backing band. For this fifth album, they relocated to the aptly named Dust And Stone studio in Tucson, Arizona, and roped in Americana legend Howe Gelb (Giant Sand, OP8) on production duties.

The result is a sumptuous affair, with Gelb allowing these dozen songs the space and time to breathe. Indeed, some of the creaks and groans behind the music, allied to the quietly dramatic guitar flourishes, call to mind nobody more so than Gelb’s old muckers in Calexico.

There’s a southern feel, from the Latin-stained waltz of the instrumental ‘Reigns Of Ruin’, complete with the lonesomest brass interlude heard outside a New Mexico cantina, to the western-tinged ‘Where The Shadow Goes’: the latter is so evocative you almost expect Alan Ladd to ride in on a chestnut mare and make everything OK.

Leech and McCausland’s voices blend sinuously together, so it’s often hard to tell where one ends and the other begins, as on the hauntingly delicate ‘Echoes In The Wind’. Elsewhere, the hypnotic hoofbeat percussion of ‘Come Tomorrow’ is what Nick Drake might have sounded like if he’d been born in South Carolina. You can almost feel the shadow of Will Oldham, meanwhile, in the background of ‘Songs Of Fire’ and ‘Nothing’s Gonna Change Me Now’.

The duo co-wrote three songs with Glen Hansard, including the windswept ‘Iron Road’ and the warm sprinkle of ‘Summer Rain’, the latter coming on like Richard Hawley covering Jonny Mercer’s ‘Summer Wind’. The standout, though, is ‘More Than I Can Comprehend’: delicate finger plucked guitar forms the backdrop for a stunning exploration of love gone wild, with Leech admitting “Darling, this love of ours, it might just kill us both”. Falling apart has rarely sounded so divine. Out Now

Rating: 8/10