Mull Historical Society Day today on It Starts With a Birthstone. Loss, their debut album from 2001 is possibly one of the great, forgotten records of the last twenty years - forgotten that is except for the faithfully devoted. A band only in name really as they're almost wholly the work and loving inspiration of Colin Macintyre, a graduate of Tobermory High School, the only secondary school on The Isle of Mull in Scotland.
Loss is a sweeping, majestic album, an incredible melodic, poetic, immersive experience, as if Roddy Frame had met Sufjan Stevens and moved to a cottage in the Highlands with a choir and orchestra section to record together, having named themselves after the local archaeology club. Instead it's actually just Macintyre and those he's gathered around him, inspired by the beauty all around him, the misfits all around him, his Mull upbringing, the death of his father, childhood and his muse. It's a small masterpiece. Small, but a masterpiece nevertheless!
All this time later, Macintyre has a new album out in 2018, produced by Bernard Butler, a memoir called Hometown Tales and a children's book called The Humdrum Drum apparently with singalong tunes. I look forward to hearing more news of all three. In the meantime I'm just grateful for catching up over the last day or so with Loss, more than fifteen years after its initial release. I'd forgotten, or perhaps I never realised, just how good it is! I do now.
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