Michael Morley - Pushed Streets

The common understanding of Michel Morley is not that of an acoustic artist, his lifelong commitment to the stargate bursting sound of the Dead C and his frequently scorching work as Gate the calling cards most likely to earn him a deserving good few pages in the Great Book of Underground Music (whenever it is Bruce Russell gets round to writing it). But as with most things, reality is a little broader than the legend allows, and Morley has now spent a decade or so channeling his muse through a different source, unplugging and paring back while still in service to the dark night of the soul evocations that have underscored this music from the start. Pushed Streets provides evidence of just that, a collection of songs said to have emerged after Morley had discovered a series of Spanish and classical guitar records in his local record store bargain bin but sound a significant way removed from those inspirations. Whatever your tool of choice, I suppose you can't change who you really are, and these twelve primitively rendered, close-mic-d acoustic (mostly six, sometimes twelve string) confessionals pulse with the kind of late-hour epiphanous rapture you might assume would come from someone who'd played on 'Hell Is Now Love'. Where this latest record differs from Morley's previous outing for Thin Wrist, the Fahey-styled Heavens Idleness Awaits, is in its embracing of the (relatively) short-form and vocal performance. In short, Morley is singing songs here, vocally exploring ideas his guitar alone does not, a move towards the folk-tradition that doesn't entirely forget the darkened dissonance of his past. And it's a gnarled, whispering voice, perfectly suited to such things, as if Morley was always destined to sing these songs. Which I suppose he was (if not him, who else?), it was just us that didn't see the road leading to them.