Ross Stewart and Band - Sells Out Voodoo Daddy's Showroom

Phew! Sultry Stuff - In The Desert You’ll Find Me

The Molee Shakes - Debut Album - Review

Released this morning, with the launch gig at Norwich Puppet Theatre tonight, we at last get a full draft of The Molee Shakes – and it tastes good.  It is like a long, slow, cold beer on an oppressively humid day.  The duo of Mowenna Farrell and Lee Dickerson bring welcome chills to heat of summer.

This is a great album for a go-with-the-flow, tell me a story, laid-back mood, in a let’s not rush about, (it’s too hot for rushing), let’s just rock gently to the swaying rhythms of a lived-in voice telling slow, wild tales, accompanied by the echoing lap-steel guitar laments.

The album is beautifully put together.  It sets a distinctive tone and maintains that mood throughout.  This is sustained by sparingly-used percussion.  Drums are lightly deployed, with the delicate touch of Jack Gascoigne bringing music of his own to the melodic scenery. The rhythm of the guitars, the lilt of Mo Farrells’s voice and her elegant phrasing, all bring the essential movement to the music, which is then gently emphasised by knocking on the pick guard, or the body of her acoustic Yamaha guitar, or a damped tambourine old-Spanish holiday rusty tambourine.

In The Desert You’ll Find Me is an eleven song art-house movie soundtrack of an album. Slowly moving from scene to scene, tracking across a lonesome, arid landscape, gradually, inevitably, drawing you closer to the anonymous itinerant female lead.  Each song gives just enough text to the listener to let them write a subplot of their own.  

 

Intro Song and High Horse are fine examples of the art of song-writing.  Throw breadcrumbs before the audience and hook them into their own versions of the lyric by leaving enough gaps for them to work up their own connections.  I challenge you to listen to Swimming and then discuss it with a friend or two about the storyline.  There is plenty of room for the imagination to join the dots, paint in the undertones yourself.  I love how this album allows the listener to follow their own drift.  No one will have the same take, but each will love it, for their own reasons. 

 

The songs and basic melodies are predominantly, Farrell’s, (Lover Boy is Dickerson’s initial idea), with the texture and atmospherics coming from Dickerson’s guitars.  Their creative combination is essential to the completeness of this album.  In The Desert You Will Find Me will enhance any collection.  It is a country blues album that would sits neatly alongside R L Burnside’s early recordings.

 

This strongly visually-oriented album ends with Outro (In the desert you’ll find me) which ties it all up delightful bow of heart-aching “La-la-la-la La” and a mournful whistled phrase then the silence of the desert.  I took a breath and then just rewound to listen again...and again.

 

The Molee Shakes debut album was recorded and mastered with Gavin Bowers at Catch-21 Records, Norwich, who helped Farrell and Dickerson keep things simple.  They record straight onto 8-track tape and work from that, although they have been known to reduce this to 4-track to keep the authentic raw feel.  This is a souvenir album, one that can be returned to for the memories of places and events that you are not quite ready to let go of, not for a long time. A perfect 35 minutes of being somewhere else. 

 

Spencer Ide

9^th August, 2024