TOURIST - MEMORY MORNING
Released: 07/06/2024
One of the bastions of a genre that, for want of a better term, we can call ‘thinky dance’, Tourist – AKA Cornwall’s William Phillips – is, along with peers such as Kieran Hebden, and Floating Point’s Sam Shepherd, an expert at smuggling deceptively tricksy rhythmical and melodic patterns into feel-good bangers. On his excellent fifth album, Memory Morning, Phillips beautifully marries the wistful with the life-affirming, as on tracks such as the propulsive ‘Blink’, with which he proves to be an esoteric crate-digger on a par with Hebden, as he moulds a sampled vocal line from the 80s avant-pop group Mecano’s ‘El Amante De Fuego’ into something exquisitely, mournfully lovely. Similarly, on ‘A Little Bit Further’, Shepherd samples Mark Fry’s beautiful 1971 psych-folk gem ‘Song for Wilde’, the circular, gently finger-picked chords and Fry’s spectrally plangent vocal slowly transmuting into bona fide dance floor-destroyer. An album that works just as well as a ruminative headphone record as it does in a club, Memory Morning is a salve for body and mind.
Pickup currently unavailable at Dreamhouse Records