Red River Dialect: <em>Broken Stay Open Demos</em>

Red River Dialect: Broken Stay Open Demos

$7.00

In celebration of the three-year anniversary of the release of Red River Dialect‘s miraculous Broken Stay Open Sky (2018, PoB-039), songwriter David Morris has shared the solo demos he recorded which became the album, in collaboration with the whole Red River Dialect crew. This release includes three as yet unheard tracks that didn’t make it to the LP or any other RRD release.

SKU: PoB-064 Category: Tags: , ,

Album Narrative

In celebration of the three-year anniversary of the release of Red River Dialect‘s miraculous Broken Stay Open Sky (2018, PoB-039), songwriter David Morris has shared the solo demos he recorded which became the album, in collaboration with the whole Red River Dialect crew. This release includes three as yet unheard tracks that didn’t make it to the LP or any other RRD release. Every Bandcamp download of this digital-only album includes a coupon to pick up BSOS on any format at half price (Bandcamp only)—a perfect anniversary bundle for the album called “beatific” by MOJO and like “Steve Gunn transplanted to Kernow” by Clash.

The artwork shows Gull Rock on the north Cornish coast, as did the beautiful cover on the full band recording, but this time we see it from a different angle. David says: “When I shot the film that this photograph was taken from I was trying to recreate the way it felt when looking at the outcrop from Trebarwith beach as a child; it looked like a cave or portal in the sky. At the time I had already found the photo we eventually used by artist Dayna Cowper online, but hadn’t yet managed to get in contact with her. Fortunately I found a gallery in the Yorkshire Dales, where she had exhibited a few years previously; they forwarded a message on to her, and she eventually agreed to let us use that shot for Broken Stay Open Sky. It perfectly encapsulates the feeling. In kind, here are the songs in an embryonic form, before the enrichment of collaboration and the fullness of sonic light and shade. Playing and singing these songs into a portable digital recorder I was thrilled to feel them take shape, and to imagine where Ed, Kiran, Robin, Coral and Simon would take them. Now that the album has been out for three years, these versions have a sort of shimmer and a grain, as well as a vibrance, and I am happy that the songs that didn’t make it to the album are finding a way out.”

Highlights

Tracklist

1. “Aery Thin” (solo demo)
2. “Cave of the Blue Dragon”
3. “Open Sky [bell]” (solo demo)
4. “Cinders” (solo demo)
5. “Laniakea”
6. “Kukkuripa” (solo demo)
7. “Hills of Galloway”
8. “Juniper / The View” (solo demo)

Catalog Number / Formats / Release Date

PoB-064 / Digital / Feb. 5, 2021

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Acknowledgments for Broken Stay Open Sky

There’s always a hint of sorrow to Red River Dialect, a feeling of unworthiness in the face of beauty. [The] first single already feels like a burden lifted. “Kukkuripa” radiates a beaming light. The band stretches out a rhapsodic melody like a ribbon chasing the wind, the fabric undulating over a thumping drone of violin and low-lying guitars.

– Lars Gotrich, NPR Music

8/10. Gentle, thoughtful compositions that mix straightforward observation with naturalistic imagery and philosophical inquiry.

– Uncut

Frenzied and fantastic… a radical, thundering realm. Alternates white noise with sweet, intricate harmonies, and an unrelenting pressure between the two. Songwriter David Morris credits his spiritual practice as the inspiration for these sweeping, massive songs that incorporate old world folk and the tension of noise and drone music with equal force.

– Uproxx

4 stars. Red River Dialect’s tempo is beatific, fingerpicked guitar and violin cresting sweetly, though some fervent moments provide real highlights: Morris’s earnest tones crack with loss on Aery Thin, while the clipped vocals and febrile undertow make Gull Rock thrillingly combustible, and hopefully an indication of Red River Dialect’s future.

– Laura Snapes, MOJO

8/10. A beguilingly atmospheric record… imagine Steve Gunn transplanted to Kernow and you’d be close.

– Clash Music

An album of breathtakingly rare beauty. A classic in every sense.

– Martyn Coppack, Echoes and Dust

A restless questioning of self and purpose in a mature and complex collection.

– Record Collector

It’s the earnest balance Morris strikes between brokenness and openness — his willingness to savor the condition of being broken open — that makes the experience of this music so deeply sustaining.

– Dusted

Brimming with glorious dizzying energy and tension, primitive and cut loose from modern constraints. Impossible to resist.

– Folk Radio UK

4 stars. The fourth album from Red River Dialect is another triumph for US label Paradise of Bachelors. Fusing guitars, cello, violin, banjo, piano, dulcimer and drums, the Cornwall-bred, London-based sextet fashion a beguiling and subdued style of folk music, informed by West Country pastoral culture.

– Morning Star

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