Description:	CD on Next Best Way
	Format:	CD
	Genre(s):	Singer-Songwriter
	Label:	Next Best Way
	Price:	£8.49
	Availability:	Sold out / currently unavailable. Sorry!

5
...according to our Phil on 04 January 2008.

Alastair Galbraith has been around for years and he's someone we've stocked since we started doing this 12 or so years ago back when he was doing gear for Flying Nun and Xpressway. I'm delighted he's still going as some of his stuff over the years has been amazing. Orb is his first album since 2000 and it's pretty inspirational gear. It's chocca full of hiss, fuzz, backwards guitars, layered vocals, interesting structures, folk, drones.... Listen to 'Skip' and you'll think your CD player is broken. I've heard it a few times now and it gets me every time. This is going to appeal to those of you into the whole New Zealand experimental folk scene. I love a bit of this me. CD only and they came fresh from the hills of Dunedin courtesy of the Nextbestway label. I reckon that's some sort of pun. I like puns, though not as much as Ant likes gloves. He's well jackson.

Love this record? Hate it? Tell us.

What their label says...

not since 2000's CRY has alastair galbraith
delivered an album of song-based material
 
here are 20 new tracks, all hiss and bones
raw hurt and high wonder.
 
 familiar backwards  folk  
 barely-there ballad-fragments  
a  "Short Dream For Fire Organ"
 
favourites would have to include the rock-bottom alt-country resignation  of "something happened" the tidal hypnotics of "head down" and the mirror-imaged "your lilt"  which ends with you waltzing with a skating cello round heaven.

'New songs from Alastair Galbraith are always cause for celebration;
bunches of them come along with the frequency of rare weather systems and
command the senses in like fashion. His songcraft continues to chart a
course of development that's wonderful and strange and brave. The
attention-grabbing sounds, their textures, often lead people to focus on
that end of things, and one can rather see why - Alastair's drones seep
through his songs like rain through a roof. But the small core of
everything has always been the song, and these new songs explore and
celebrate the fragility of the form, and Alastair's wholly unique
familiarity with that fragility. I've always considered him a miniaturist
- he treats his songs like ships carved out of wine corks, light and
delicate, thin and transparent here, red-soaked and musty there. It's
shockingly intimate stuff; listening, I feel like I'm being told a secret,
and that the secret will do big things once it's let loose on the world.'
 
JOHN DARNIELLE - THE MOUNTAIN GOATS