Mary Lorson And Saint Low - Tricks For Dawn

  by Anthony Strutt

published: 8 / 2 / 2003

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Review

Mary Lorson and Billy Cote have been writing music together since ‘91, when they formed Madder Rose. Since Madder Rose’s last album, ‘Hello June Fool’, which came out in 1999, Mary has formed Saint Low, while Billy formed the very weird Jazz Cannon project. The 12 pieces of music that make up ‘Piano Creeps’ can not be called pop music. Only two pieces have vocals, and one of them ‘See the Stars’, because of this, stands out too much with its Gentle Waves style tweeness. It is definitely the album’s best track. The rest of ‘Piano Creeps’ is more classically driven. ‘E Guitar’ opens up the album with some hypnotic guitar and a haunting drum beat. ‘Turtle Song’ is keyboards based. ‘Dig a Hole’ is the only other song with vocals. but they are so muddy, you can’t really hear what Mary is singing about. It starts off being a bit trippy and then gets more muddy as the song goes on. On the whole, ‘Piano Creeps’ is pleasant enough, and is nice instrumental music to cook or to chill out too. It is not really as commerical as Madder Rose, but that was the aim. It sounds from this as if Mary and Billy were looking to write soundtrack music. There are some nice violin pieces which sound very sad. At a recent London Borderline gig to promote the album, Mary and Billy mainly stuck to playing Saint Low numbers, while Madder Rose’s ‘Car Song’ got the biggest cheer of the night. A good album, but not really my sort of thing !

Track Listing:-

1 E Guitar
2 Turtle Song
3 Dig A Hole
4 newfield Baptist Church
5 Che
6 World's Fair
7 See The Stars
8 Piano Creeps
9 Old Man Dance
10 Near The Theme
11 Americana #1
12 Joe's House

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