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Hobotalk
It's 7am, the kitchen is littered with broken cutlery and half drunk cups of tea. A Tom Waits record scratches away quietly in the living room, and hunched over an old tape recorder in his bedroom, Marc Pilley, the singer/songwriter and creative force behind the Scottish outfit Hobotalk, is working on a new tune.
Playing back the tape is like listening to his diary entries; candid musings on life, love and loss, set to the hiss of tape and warbling guitar plucked into a cheap microphone, that speak straight to the soul.
It's an apt picture, when considering the band's recently released 2nd album, Notes on Sunset, an intimate and sparsely produced collection of songs that has the homegrown sound and feel of a band playing right in your very bedroom.
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"We recorded the album simply in a run down church on the east coast of Scotland with old recording gear, the emphasis on the right take bein the important thing. Intimacy and warmth. I wanted the vocals to sound like i was singin over the listeners shoulder. I guess the production on notes is that there was none. Simple and direct, with every little noise in its dusty place."
Notes is a deceptively unassuming record. Songs of lovelorn beauty and humanity, pared down instrumentally to the bare bones of the message, in a manner that is reminiscent of the way that Raymond Carver writes short stories. Piano and acoustic guitars create the key motifs, interweaving with close harmonies and heartrending melodies. Some of the songs, like 'In the Arms of Love' are almost haunting, others, like 'Little Light', tell timeless and instantly recognisable themes of redemption; but resonant throughout the album is Pilley's frank lyric and yearning vocal.
And what a voice! "There is no-one in contemporary music with a voice quite like Pilley's" quoted The Times. Like the illegitimate lovechild of Joni Mitchell and Thom Yorke, Pilley's voice speaks plaintively and passionately, whether in the close baritone of early songs like "Walks With Me", or the soaring tenor vibrato in the outro of "Me & My mountain", and in doing so provides something unique in the current musical climate where style is favoured over substance; a band fronted by a singer, playing songs from the heart.
But it has been a long and ongoing journey since the release of their debut album "Beauty in Madness" in 2000. Received to much critical acclaim, it was shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize nominations and listed in The Times top 20 albums of that year. The intervening years saw turmoil with the record label, and changes both in Pilleys life and his band, but the one thing that remained constant was his prolific musical output. And while the image of him recording into a tape machine at dawn could be cynically dismissed as some sort of romantic spin, conjured up for publicity purposes, it is actually how he works. For when it comes to songwriting, Pilley is something of a workaholic. Almost an obsessive. And not out of obligation, but out of a pure, driven need to create.
"My first choice of instrument has always been my acoustic guitar. Story, lyric, guitar and voice in the age old tradition of a few chords and the truth. I feel like I've come in from the cold, havin travelled physically and emotionally threw many storms. I gather all my memories and ghosts and first put them onto paper as little prose. Poems, stories. I guess to me personally my hurt will always remain somewhere in the pit of my stomach, you just have to learn how to locate it, especially when writing."
Ironically then, that in spite of the troubled passage that has fortified Pilley's recent material, Notes on Sunset is a more sanguine, upbeat record than the brooding melancholy of Beauty in Madness. But then the music that Hobotalk create can't be easily pigeonholed. Marc could have been just as at home writing songs in a room next door to Carole King on Tin Pan Alley or opening for Fred Neil in Greenwhich Village, as he can be identified with contemporary celtic pop or the recent west coast folk movement. The uncluttered instrumentation hints at early Tim Hardin, while the sonorous harmonies recall Crosby Stills & Nash. Live, the band play off each other with the natural affinity of family members. Individual ego and musical trickery is eschewed in favour of submitting to the song, allowing ample space for the soaring breadth and delivery of Pilley's vocal. With the dynamic they create, and their swagger on the stage, you could be forgiven at times for thinking you were in the audience of The Last Waltz.
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And furthermore, while Notes on Sunset is a beautiful reintroduction to the music of Hobotalk, it is important to recognise that the material hitherto released commercially has far from caught up with Pilley's prolific output. Which suggests that, as has been noted recently in the press, there is "a formidable body of work submerged just under the tip of the iceberg"
The Band
- Marc Pilley - singer, songwriter, acoustic guitar
- Ali Petrie - piano, rhodes, wurlitzer, organ and bass.
- Nick Houldsworth - electric and acoustic guitars, harmonica
- Alan Cranston - drums and percussion
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