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Kevin McCormick, the Manchester-based home-recording artist who first appeared on our radar thanks to Smiling C's reissues of his early 80s work, both solo and with David Horridge, returns with his first new work in four decades. Plenty has happened in that intervening period, not least a significant critical reappraisal and raising of awareness of those first recordings, and somewhat inevitably McCormick's early inspirations have been reignited once more because of the contemporary interest in his formerly lost past. Remarkably, it does appear as if no time has passed at all, Passing Clouds picking up where 1982's Light Patterns left off with its vaporous journey into ECM bliss and Durutti Column-like guitar isolationism. As we've commented before, because McCormick was based in Manchester during the same period, comparisons to Vini Reilly are to be expected, though my instinct is that it's more likely they were sharing the same influences rather than any kind of social circle. McCormick cites John Abercrombie and Eberhard Weber as enduring inspirations, though there are also the ghosts of Manuel Gottsching and Richard Pinhas in these elegiac guitar tones, and any one of these nine tracks could have reasonably been included in NTS' recent European Primitive collection. Moreover, McCormick is re-plugging into a tradition here, the pull of which he felt 40 years ago still authentically present now. Nothing to fault here: this is no vanity-driven re-examination of former interests and McCormick delivers in a way that should have equal appeal to Music From Memory acolytes or fans of the recent Thought Leadership tapes as it does those first albums. A generously spirited, heartwarming return.
FFO: John Abercrombie and Eberhard Weber, Thought Leadership, Manuel Gottsching, Dave Maddison, Vini Reilly/Durutti Column
