Description
Label Review.
2020 album. Folk rock. Also available on Vinyl.
Our Overview.
New album from kosmiche Scottish folk-rock quartet Modern Studies, who unite pastoral chamber pop and folk with a gently experimental approach. Incorporating lush harmonies, jazz-tinged rhythms, and subtle electronics, the band produce elaborate full-lengths such as 2018’s ‘Welcome Strangers’. “There is a calmness in its melancholy, a beauty in its blues. These are songs that see the mystical beyond the material, abstracted folk ballads awash in memory.” Mojo
A glorious compendium of haunted disco hallelujahs, mercurial krautrock chorales, cosmic pop adagios and euphoric, resilient, anthems. ‘The Weight of the Sun’ sees principal songwriters Emily Scott and Rob St John further their warm, esoteric field studies with Pete Harvey and Joe Smillie, as previously reconnoitred on ‘Swell To Great’ (2016) and ‘Welcome Strangers’ (2018).
Modern Studies formed in 2015 around the songwriting of Glaswegian musician Emily Scott. Having recently written a set of songs on an antique pedal harmonium, which she was about to donate to her friend Pete Harvey’s studio, Scott’s material soon became the center of a new collaboration with Harvey, Joe Smillie, and Rob St. John. The group of multi-instrumentalists assembled at Harvey’s Pumpkinfield studio in rural Perthshire and adorned Scott’s thoughtful tunes with cello, analog synths, double bass, drums, and a variety of other tones, emerging with their full-length debut, ‘Swell to Great’.
“The exact point where Fairport Convention meet Jim O’Rourke at a remote Scottish railway station.” Tim Burgess.
“Melancholic magic… recalls Johnny Marr’s hazier reveries and the febrile, electrified folk of Polly Harvey’s Let England Shake.” UNCUT
“Setting the standards for intelligent pop” Record Collector.
Tracklisting: Photograph / Run for Cover / Heavy Water / She / Corridors / Signs of Use Side B / Brother / The Blue of Distance / Back to the City / Jacqueline / Spaces / Shape of Light