Review: Memory Drawings - There Is No Perfect Place

I imagine wheels turning. Wooden cart wheels tilting over a beaten path through wheat fields and numerous centuries; a direct path carved through pastor’s blanketed acres, wooden spokes gleaming in the glaze of a dry summer. The journey is pleasant but assured, ambling but in no doubt of destination, while the instruments slot together as though hand-carved to accommodate eachother – dulcimer pegged in the gaps between guitar notes, violin laced delicately through the spokes. Each track is elegantly incestuous and whole. They are objects of insular and circular mechanism, each tight enough to be cupped in the palm of my hands.

The melodies tell of sunshine and upward agricultural growth. “The Island Of The Day Before” is a mere snapshot of an infinite jam (drums pulsing with inexhaustible pop, chords cycling through harvest and regeneration), while the title track works on an alternation between miniature suspension and resolve, like falling backward into the safety and renewed faith of a friend’s arms. I see ears of corn waving at me against the delicate breeze of synthesiser and guitars shooting skyward in bloom, as Memory Drawings linger in the pleasant warmth of solitary ideas. The melody loops until it thickens into heat on my face and the smell of churned earth – a persistent rendering of place that first becomes vivd, and then becomes real.