Bill MacKay – Locust Land (2024) [FLAC 24bit/48kHz]

Bill MacKay – Locust Land (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 29:15 minutes | 329 MB | Genre: Indie Folk, Folk Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Americana
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Drag City

Locust Land is the latest album by Bill Mackay, released by Drag City. This captivating collection of songs showcases Mackay’s unique blend of folk, Americana, and experimental music. With intricate guitar work and emotive storytelling, Locust Land takes listeners on a journey through landscapes both familiar and otherworldly. Mackay’s skillful musicianship shines through in each track, creating a sonic tapestry that is both soothing and thought-provoking.The album features a diverse range of musical influences, from traditional folk melodies to avant-garde soundscapes. Mackay’s innovative approach to songwriting results in a sound that is at once timeless and contemporary. Listeners will find themselves drawn into the rich textures and evocative lyrics of Locust Land, exploring themes of nature, love, and the passage of time. Each song unfolds like a chapter in a novel, inviting deeper reflection with every listen.Overall, Locust Land is a masterful work that showcases Bill Mackay’s talent as both a musician and a storyteller. With its haunting melodies and poetic lyrics, this album is sure to resonate with fans of indie folk and experimental music alike.Multi-dimensional Chicago guitarist Bill McKay, a one-time member of bands Sounds of Now, Broken Things and Darts & Arrows, released his solo debut Esker in 2017. McKay then spent the past half decade as an astute collaborator with such angular players as Steve Gunn, Bill Callahan, and Will Oldham. On Locust Land, his solo follow-up, he continues to explore rock, jazz, and folk in his idiosyncratic way. Using evocative terms like “liquidity,” and “garage jazz,” to describe his music, McKay accompanies his guitar work on organ and various synths and stacking overdubs in compelling multi-hued settings. Opener “Phantasmic Fairy” has the feel of a renaissance guitar piece played against a psychedelic synth background. The straightforward folk pop number, “Keeping in Time,” has unmistakable echoes—in a very good way—of Cat Stevens in his prime. With McKay going raga on electric guitar, the instrumental “Glow Drift,” with Michael Patrick Avery rattling cymbals and bell percussion in the background, feels like a close relative to “Sympathy for the Devil.” In another all-instrumental track, “Radiator,” with Sam Wagster on bass, McKay intertwines overdubbed lines with the flavor of English folk rock before ending with an emphatic strummed chord. After a ringing intro, “Oh Pearl” features McKay on bluesy slide guitar and the smaller higher pitched requinto guitar, on an all-instrumental journey whose rhythms are influenced by the North African desert blues. A tentative but effective singer, McKay’s lyrics are routinely cryptic and skeletal. In “Half of You” he delivers this album’s best lines: “What a thing to write about/ Your family’s so far out/ They think it’s hard on you/ Well, at least they know some/ But not the half of you.” And perhaps alluding to his restless creativity, McKay sings on “When I Was Here,” “After all this time I’m not sure what has changed/ Though things in my head have all been rearranged” before the realization that, “We can play and seize the day/ The sketches draw you to their game.” A masterful player whose self-portrait is filling in, Bill McKay continues to build a unique musical dialect. – Robert Baird

Tracklist:

1-1. Bill MacKay – Phantasmic Fairy (01:53)
1-2. Bill MacKay – Keeping in Time (03:14)
1-3. Bill MacKay – Glow Drift (03:06)
1-4. Bill MacKay – Half of You (03:10)
1-5. Bill MacKay – Oh Pearl (03:14)
1-6. Bill MacKay – Radiator (04:53)
1-7. Bill MacKay – When I Was Here (03:35)
1-8. Bill MacKay – Neil’s Field (01:54)
1-9. Bill MacKay – Locust Land (04:12)

Download from FileJoker: