F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Love of the Last Tycoon contains a passage that reads: "It would come in some such guise as the auto-horns from the technicolor boulevards below or be barely audible, a tattoo on the muffled drum of the moon. He strained to hear it, knowing only that music was beginning, new music that he liked and did not understand." The book's climactic love scene served as the basis of a Movietone song from 2000's beguiling and beautiful The Blossom Filled Streets. Yet the description above continues to lend itself to the Bristol group's follow-up, The Sand and the Stars, in that their music embodies both closeness and distance, the encompassing sounds in between (be they boulevards or heavenly bodies) as much a part of the music as the music itself.
This is not accidental: the quintet lugged recording equipment out of their home studio and into churches and warehouses, up a cliff, and even into a bay near Land's End to capture that quality. The incidental, environmental sounds infuse with guitar, dulcimer, banjo, brushed drums, cubist bass, and the pastoral whispers of Kate Wright and Rachel Brook (who offset the brunt of early Flying Saucer Attack with a gentle serenity in her maiden days). The songs in turn reflect the cyclic patterns of ebb and flow found out there in the elements. "Ocean Song" gently sways along with the tremolo guitar and malleted patter of toms, as dripping water makes its own rhythm somewhere deeper in the mix. "Let Night In" vacillates between Rachel's "Chopsticks"-piano and more pedal-heavy resonance, accompanied by her husband's strums.
Harmonizing with accordion and wine glasses on "Pale Tracks", Sam and Matt Jones have all the morose male throat of the early, shadow-shrouded records of their fellow stable-mates Palace Brothers. Perhaps to keep up with the incoming tide, Movietone expand to nine players for "We Rode On"-- here, clarinet, trumpet and saxophone breathe along with the bay. "Snow Is Falling" imagines a subdued, small Mingus group accompanying Vashti Bunyan through the drifts swirling at nightfall, juxtaposing a dark, walking bass with the lighter exhalations of Kate Wright. The only bit of abstract noise to make it over from The Blossom Filled Streets comes in the organ interlude of "Not Even Close", and even that recedes into subdued guitar and the banjo and wobbly jazz of "Red Earth".
The final two songs of the disc find the group wandering about with their instruments out to the beach itself. "Beach Samba" is as joyful and refreshing as a quick, chilly dip with Shirley Collins, Astrud Gilberto and Lionel Belasco, while closer "Near Marconi's Hut" finds Kate Wright alone on a coastal path at night, with only her guitar to warm her voice and a lighthouse to shine in the darkness. In its final minutes, The Sand and the Stars gleans a delicate, human music between the distant heavens and cold terra firma.
