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Dean McPhee’s music defies easy categorisation. A quick search on the internet yields vague and sometimes contradictory results: he’s a guitarist, a composer, a songwriter with a sound that is based in folk music, or ambient, or post-rock. It’s the sort of thing that means that after a couple of decades, he’s still a well-kept secret. But perceived genre-slipperiness rewards the curious: the unpindownable nature of the music means that you have to get involved in some genuinely active listening. Starting with a track like 2008’s Water Burial, for example, you might pick up strains of hauntology and prog, tempered by the clean guitar lines reminiscent of late-stage David Grubbs. The four tracks that make up 2011’s Son of the Black Peace are at once intricate and architectural, the exploratory guitar lines winding along darkly experimental backroads or twisting zephyr-like in the air. 2021 album Witch’s Ladder saw McPhee’s fingerpicking move towards the freakier and more experimental edgelands of folk music and jazz, while building up Eno-esque abstractions where clear harmonic vistas hum with drone and reverb.
McPhee’s soundworld is eerie and beautiful. His insistence that those two poles can exist together is most evident on his fifth album, Astral Gold. The elements that make it instantly recognisable as a Dean McPhee album are all there. Initially clean guitar lines flooded with reverb: check. Long, cosmically-inclined instrumentals: check. Looping, loping bass: check. Subtle but strange electronic tinkering: check. But here, everything seems slightly more condensed than before. From the off, the album seems to identify with a signature sound, albeit one with varied and wide-ranging influences, and there is a loose overarching theme that settles somewhere between cosmogony and cosmology. Four of the six tracks have previously been released on EPs or as contributions to compilations; all were recorded live in a single take (a fact that becomes more extraordinary the more you listen to them and appreciate the depth and complexity on show).
The album kicks off with the fittingly titled Cosmos. Immediately, we’re met with a groove that could have its roots in post-rock or even metal. There’s a wired intensity to the playing that shows a marked progression from earlier releases. The bass sets the controls for the heart of some other galaxy’s sun, never swerving off its course, while the guitar space-walks in wide circles, tethered by an invisible thread. Ether begins more gently: an insistent little riff, nodding to minimalism, nudges the track along, and once again, the guitar takes flight, losing itself in echo and reverb and occasionally returning to a momentary clarity.
McPhee’s strong instincts toward the unconventional are indulged most fully in Lunar Fire, with its spooky e-bow bass and use of field recordings, but those characteristic wandering guitars still remain paramount. This time round they are slow, deep and yearning. Neptune takes the pace down even further, retreating into immersive drones and richly layered electronic swathes and all but dispensing with conventional ideas of melody. The sense of progression is palpable, but how that progression is executed is very different from what you’d usually find in folk music or pop or rock. It’s closer to a tableau than a linear musical narrative.
The Second Message shows off McPhee’s evident love for the more esoteric realms of folklore: the short piece was inspired by the 1987 Ilkley Moor UFO incident and manages to convey the preternatural oddness of the original encounter. The final track, The Sediment of Creation, which, along with Lunar Fire, is one of two entirely new pieces on the album, is perhaps the most impressive thing here: nearly eleven minutes of shifting melodies and uneasy chords, growing in stature and power as the instruments echo and multiply. The base of the piece is disarmingly simple, but the result somehow seems to exist in more dimensions than music usually does. This kind of composition can sometimes lead to a music that lacks emotional depth, but that is simply not the case with McPhee. In many ways, it’s a cerebral trip for sure, but every minute of Astral Gold is brimming with what can only be described as soul.
Filmed by Dave George at Proper Studio, Lancaster.
Available to preorder now from record shops (distributed by Cargo Records/Forced Exposure) – also some limited copies are available to preorder via Bandcamp: https://deanmcphee.bandcamp.com/album/astral-gold
Listening Party:
February 14, 2024, at 7:00 PM GMT – details here: https://deanmcphee.bandcamp.com/merch/astral-gold-listening-party
Website: https://deanmcphee.co.uk/