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The Gulp world has always been one that’s occupied the other side of the mirror, where fantasy has the upper hand over reality.
For many of us a sense of place is important, even if it’s only to serve as an anchor.
An identity can come from place (or equally one to confound or escape from), but there’s a catalytic effect which paraphrases the often-cited cliché – don’t just write about what you know, write from where you know.
For Gulp‘s Lindsey Leven and Guto Pryce – the latter of the it feels permanently on sabbatical
Super Furry Animals – that place is north east Fife, a little populated area of Scotland where for them, they’ve found that wellspring from which to create.
Live4ever has pootled up there in our camper van more than once and we can attest that it is indeed a) gorgeous and b) by extension as blank a canvas as any musician could wish for.
Via it, the Gulp duo plus keyboard player Andrew Wasylyk and regular band members Gid Goundrey (guitar) and Stuart Kidd (drums) have created a singular kind of musical realm.
Their third album, Beneath Strawberry Moons, follows on a full seven years from their last, 2018’s All Good Wishes, with this one recorded under laid back circumstances in the Piggery Studio in nearby Cupar, and the duo’s garden cabin.
Seekers of omens are in good company here. We’ll let Lindsey explain: “Our main recording week fell on the week of summer solstice, and under a waning strawberry moon.”
“On the day of mastering there was a rare great planetary alignment, or planetary parade and, on the day, we signed off the album, we witnessed the lowest lying strawberry moon, another once-in-a-generational event.”
As if that wasn’t enough, there are first times for everything and broken superstitions too, as Pryce, more than three decades into his chosen profession, sings for the first time, sharing vocal duties on the cello-led Summer Storm, an impish exercise in drizzled psych pop that, much like the rest of the record, has a pastoral, calming outlook.
The embodiment of this comes most directly with Hope Shines Through The Haar, Wasylyk’s subtle Rhodes and mellotron – and the rarity of a flute solo – bestowing a sunshine folk aesthetic onto words about being able to see through the fog (of life) and still view an optimistic horizon.
Too difficult at the moment, some would argue, but the Gulp world has always been one that’s occupied the other side of the mirror, where fantasy has the upper hand over reality.
In this dimension, as Always So Far bears witness to, a simple love song can sound like it’s blown in from a spaghetti Western spy movie, whilst the luxuriant opener Sea Bear pulls listeners willingly through a seductive, Goldfrapp shaped wormhole.
As if summer visions, like the seasons where the pair stay, should be at best fleeting, the nine tracks on Beneath Strawberry Moons are gone in almost the blink of an ear, the Bacharachian sounding horn of closer Ultramarine Blue lending a – whisper it quietly – Café Del Mar perspective to what is a journey where its players rarely stop to regard themselves for long.
The place to dawdle most though is the halt named Wildflower, the eddying, childlike synth line recalling early Saint Etienne in every good way possible, the song itself a tangential ode to the magick of motherhood.
Once a place is part of something that will last, it becomes eternal.
On Beneath Strawberry Moons, Gulp have tied themselves to the sea and hedgerows of their new lives, in the process adding another intimately glad sounding chapter to their fascinating career.
