Back in 2006, John Murry recorded an album of murder ballads "World Without End" with Cult Memphis Folkie, Bob Frank. I really liked it in small doses. Apparently ever since then he's been working on his first solo album which just came out in Europe earlier this month and is scheduled for release in the US in the fall. I haven't heard but one song but it's getting pretty great press from the few that have noticed it's release.
Ol Chuck Prophet plays on it along with Bob Frank and it's produced by Tim Mooney, the late drummer of the American Music Club. It's all Murry originals plus one BOBBY WHITLOCK cover. JEEBUS.
Here's a
link to a pretty glowing blog review of it. For those who don't feel like reading the review, here's some more praise:
Allan Jones, Uncut Magazine Wrote:
One of the records I’ve been playing the absolute hell out of these last couple of weeks is The Graceless Age, the new album by John Murry, who Uncut regulars may remember from World Without End, a sensationally bleak 2006 collection of contemporary murder ballads he made with the Memphis singer-songwriter Bob Frank. The Graceless Age, like World Without End, [was] produced by Tim Mooney, the former American Music Club drummer, at Closer Recording, the studio Tim owned in San Francisco, at 1441 Howard Street. The more I played it, the more The Graceless Age sounded like one of the best things Mooney had been involved in, as either producer or musician, a dark and festering masterpiece.
John Davy, Flyin' Shoes Blog Wrote:
There are so many moments of beauty, delicacy and thoughtfulness throughout this album that I can hardly begin to pick them out. Frequently the instruments seem to offer different threads in a conversation, reflecting the complexity of emotion that can be experienced in any given moment. Hope wrestles with despair, pain with ecstasy, and nothing is pat or easy. Rarely are we indulged with a return to the beautiful little moments that pop music teaches us to expect to be “repeated to fade”. On Thorn Tree in the Garden, a Bobby Whitlock song that is the one cover here, the performance reaches a peak with a high, plaintive phrase sung by Murry that you can’t help but crave he would give you one more time. Restraint is a powerful tool, and he uses it well in the midst of so much careful layering of sound. “Songwriter and noisemaker” I think he calls himself, and all sorts of found sounds, snippets of broadcasts and other stuff, find themselves inserted between songs and underneath songs. It’s all just part of the astonishingly complex sounds woven together here that will take a long time to reveal all the secrets of their making.
This sounds like a pretty automatic purchase for me when it comes out in the fall. In the meantime, if anyone happens to find it out there, help a brotha out.
