Last year, M G Boulter delivered Clifftown (reviewed here), an album whose narrative landscape takes place in the faded seaside landscape of a fictional Clifftown. He told us in a follow-up interview that the album was: “rooted in my personal experience, and my feelings about my hometown, which is Southend-on-Sea, in Essex, sort of 40 miles east of London on the River Thames, and you know, I live in suburbia, and I don’t feel many people write about suburbia. But, for me, suburbia is all I’ve ever really known, and so it pervades all my song writing, it certainly has for at least the last 10 years.”
Sticking to coastal suburbia, he has announced a digital EP titled A Shadow Falls Over New Brighton that will be released on Hudson Records in June 2022, as well as an online resource for the entire Clifftown project called Clifftown Sounds – an immersive digital resource that collects all the material associated with the Clifftown album in one interactive place, it also includes the podcast series, maps, essays and recordings.
A Shadow Falls Over New Brighton EP delves further into seaside suburbia and vignettes of ordinary life, all based on M G’s own experiences of growing up in Southend-on-Sea. He says:
“When putting my mind to the preparation of the Clifftown album in early 2019 I collected around twenty five songs for inclusion, knowing full well the first process was to whittle these down to a manageable amount which could be recorded in the time we had to make the record. A Shadow Falls Over New Brighton EP presents four songs from that collection which further contribute to the atmosphere of my Clifftown project and the themes I am exploring’.
Listen to the title track below:
A Shadow Falls Over New Brighton EP was recorded in Sheffield over the first days of 2022. Nestled in a quiet neighbourhood subdued from Christmas and New Year celebrations the songs were crafted with the help of Helen Bell on violin (Jon Boden, The Old Dance School), Harriet Bradshaw on cello and piano (John Bramwell) and Andy Bell the BBC Radio 2 Folk Award-winning producer who captured the sounds in-between the muted noises of suburbia, which is as it should be for a return to Clifftown.
A Shadow Falls Over New Brighton is a Digital release available on 3rd June 2022.
LISTEN & PRE-ORDER – https://smarturl.it/mgboulter