M G Boulter returns with suburban dramas playing out scenes of hope and wonder.
‘Days Of Shaking’ is the long-anticipated follow-up to M G Boulter’s 2021 ‘Clifftown’. In this new work Boulter continues to develop his unique storytelling and song-writing style, a style Boulter himself describes as “novelistic“.
These new songs conjure a liminal suburbia. It is a mysterious world caught between sleep and waking, town and country, wonder and the mundane, the magic made more special for discovering it in such an unexpected place. Each track is a self-contained tale, told with exquisite delicacy and lyrical depth over gorgeous, ambient acoustic backing.
The album opens with the title track that hints at an extra-terrestrial landing which in the end, is probably just the lights of the local golf club as they “ascend in heavenly array”. This sets the tone for the whole album with Boulter interweaving both the monotony and wonder of the familiar into a sense that there could be something more.
In Boulter’s world, walking is freedom (‘Silver Birches’, ‘Masterless Man’) and nocturnal wanderings especially so as they offer up a mysterious, quiescent landscape. ‘Hotel at Midnight‘ vividly captures the detached feeling of moving around a space when everything is on hold, anticipating the coming of the morning. ‘The Jaws of Nothing‘ has a similar feel, this time drifting through gardens late at night; yet dawn brings yearning. In ‘Quiet’ as the world moves between “orange streetlights fizzing” and the instant when “sunlight hits the tops“, it is an opportunity to start again with “another version of me“. The hopeful possibility of “waking up as someone new” is revisited in ‘City Maps‘.
The production by Andy Bell creates a suite of wonderfully subtle arrangements which provide the perfect backdrop for the artist to play out these suburban dramas. Overall, this is a beautiful piece of song writing set to a rich instrumental texture that supports Boulter’s sincere vocals.
