Yellow Electric, 2019 reissue (orig. 1995)
Expanded reissue 2LP on Yellow Electric. Comes in a gatefold jacket with updated original artwork + several new photos.
Long-awaited reissue of Roy Montgomery's debut solo record from '95, now finding a home on Liz Harris' Yellow Electric imprint, and featuring three songs not present on the original version, as well as a little jimmying of the tracklisting.
As a key player in Pin Group, Dadamah et al, Montgomery is a recognised master of both the ecstatic and elegiac, and his guitar playing on Scenes from the South Island reaches the apotheosis of his style. Expressive, deconstructed, sometimes ambient, sometimes cacophonous pieces possessed of an elemental force. Montgomery is a highly lucid and impressionistic player, his sound at once both of the soil and of the wind. Remember that old joke about how all post rock albums had front covers of empty fields taken from the windows of moving cars? Well, I do, and there's some truth in that imagery. This is landscape music - music that conjures its own landscape - hinting at the profound and the profane through its own language. Magical stuff.
