Dec 28, 2015 Music
With her second album as Tiny Ruins, Brightly Painted One, Hollie Fullbrook made one of the most perfectly realised albums of 2014. Everything about it, from the close-up recording of her voice to the precise intonation and the warm, sympathetic, high-fidelity instrumentation, was perfectly freeze-dried in the moment of creation.What a shock, then, to hear this seven-track EP recorded with The Clean drummer Hamish Kilgour in New York. Spin it a few times and it’s easy to understand why Fullbrook found the project gratifying: in contrast to that album, her recordings here are spontaneous and informal, and the sense of freedom from not having to strive for perfection is palpable.
This is a Tiny Ruins recording through and through — they’re her songs, it’s her singing and guitar playing — but Kilgour works as an enabler, giving the songs a sense of fun with his battery of percussion objects, none of which he overplays.
Fullbrook is so enamoured of Kilgour’s spirit that “Public Menace” is simply a recording of the two of them walking through the streets, with the percussionist let loose with childlike abandon on any surface he can find on which to make a racket. What happens next could be interesting.
