Our old friend Joshua Morrison has a new band! I first fell in love with Joshua’s understated, breathy approach via some home-recorded songs on a Myspace page in 2005, and was delighted to include one of those songs on Volume 2 of Ball of Wax. He still brings the same hushed voice and subtle touch to his music, but the intervening eight years’ experiences have doubtless brought new depth to his thinking and writing. He recently teamed up with the dream team of Matt Brown, Jeramy Koepping, Jon Wesley, and Jacob Evans to form St. Kilda, a welcome new chapter in his musical story. If you haven’t heard the germ of this band, the incidental music that Morrison, Koepping, and Brown created for Megan Griffiths’s soul-shattering film Eden, I highly recommend you check it out. The movie is emotionally devastating without being exploitative or manipulative, and the music is the perfect complement.
On “Bastille Day,” the band again hits that mark of being emotionally evocative without going over the top, and Joshua’s always-restrained voice doesn’t need to soar to histrionic heights when his straightforward lyrics pack more than enough heft on their own. It’s a powerful and rare gift to hear a military veteran speak or sing about his experiences in the way Joshua has here: “I’ve been searching all over for another noble cause that may be worth risking our life and our limbs, but they risked it all. And there’s nothing left for you and me, nothing at all.” Hearing this, I feel incredibly fortunate that we have this accomplished group of musicians to help give voice to these words in such a beautiful way.