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Adrian Crowley - A Northern Country CD
We're very pleased to have released Adrian Crowley's third album A Northern Country' jointly with US label Ba-Da-Bing! and Irish label Catchy-Go-Go.
Adrian is a Dublin based self taught guitarist and singer. He sings gentle sorrowful disparate songs that have a deep emotional impact.
A Northern Country is a gorgeous album of heartbreak and loss. Gently resonating guitar and mournful cellos mix beautifully with Adrian's warm expressive voice bringing to mind the bleak autumnal melancholy of Red House Painters, Nick Drake with the folky edge of Alasdair Roberts and Will Oldham. This is a record for cold nights, loneliness and heartbreak.
Songs
- One Hundred Words For Snow
- Dark Anvil Skies
- Morning Frost
- A Northern Country
- Photographing Lightning Strikes
- Cassiopeia
- Harmonium Song
- Great Salt Lake
- Brake Lines
- Piano Song
- Happiness Came To My Door
- Birthday
Reviews
Like Nick Drake strung-out on the minor chords and major catastrophes in the lives of Low.
If there were any justice in the world, Crowley's time would be right now, for this music is comsummately, overwhelmingly and blindingly gorgeous - 9/10.
Poetic, melacholic and downbeat but far more romantic than miserable, this is a lovely album.
Where the mellow meets the magical, Galway musician Adrian Crowley's third album A Northern Country is a composite collection of twelve quietly smouldering epics appreciably at their most arresting listened to in the early twilight hours in the arms of a loved one or lost in faraway memories.
Dusty rustic arrangements underpin the heartbreaking fractured story telling found within, weighted lovingly by the drifting accompaniment of empathising strings that sooth the bitter sweet settings, overall A Northern Country is like a freshly painted pastoral landscape left out in the rain, the damp warping and dulling the colours to temper its sheen while it's inner glow remains unfettered.
Obvious reference points would suggest Red House Painters and Smog, yet there's something betrayingly innocent and wide-eyed about these picturesque glimpses that suggest the underlying hope peeping shyly through the melancholia as previously delicately woven by Nick Drake (especially on the prickly beautiful Morning Frost or the nakedly sparse hurting Happiness came to my door) are at hand, while the caressing elegance of the title track daintily combines the majesty of the Fence Collective's finest authors of numbing timeless pop and the early exquisite charm of Belle and Sebastian. Elsewhere the genteel Piano Song and Harmonium Song centre around (obviously) a piano and a harmonium, Brake Lines achingly unfurls recalling Codeine's slo-core dynamics while the albums centre point is found at Cassiopoia which sensitively twists the sorrow screw ever so tightly to provide the most brooding moment of shadow filled pop this side of Black Heart Procession. Quite personal and quite simply perfect.