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Post Office: The Marylebone Greenwave

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Artist: Post Office
Title: The Marylebone Greenwave
Format: 12" x 2
Label: Minority Records (@)
Rated: * * * * *
The aggregator of this interesting supergroup seems to have been the skilled British keyboardist, composer and arranger Eddie Stevens, former collaborator of big names like Norman Cook aka Fat Boy Slim for his side-project Freak Power, Zero 7 and Moloko, the well-known band whose voice, the one of the Irish singer Roisin Murphy, who keeps on collaborating with Eddie, at the time when they reached the apex of their career that followed the great success of "Things To Make And Do" in 2000 - maybe it's just a hunch, but the percussions of "Pin Out My Eyes", the track that got composed by well-known guest star Sia Furler, remind the ones of "Time is Now", which got masterfully emphasized by Francois K on his awesome "Blissed Out Dub" remix of that great song -. The musical journey doesn't really depart from a cross junction in London, as the name of this album could let you imagine - the Marylebone Greenwave is the almost legendary "green wave" that many taxi drivers unsuccessfully try to complete by driving through King's Cross to the Marylebone flyover with no stops by red traffic lights -, but from a mountain shelter in the French Pyrenees, the Refuge des Oulettes de Gaube, whose dawn must have inspired the title and supposedly the whole opening song of this release: its catchy sonic radiance as well as its evolution - from peaceful strings and lovely lulling French horns that vividly render the colours of a dawn to an explosive and likewise catchy explosion of sounds - follows a sonic strategy that could let you sometimes think of an imaginary crossbreed between some "orchestral" stuff by 4Hero and the more chilling stuff by Brand New Heavies, an acid jazz nuance that gets stronger and stronger on the following "Ascent of the Young", the second of seven stages/tracks that should render the concept of this album, that is a dedication to the different cycles of human life from birth to death. The gradual transition between the craziness of puberty to adulthood got rendered by the short medley "Tiny Overnight", where the seemingly peaceful sonorities begin to embrace sounds that evoke a certain concern that sounds like rising as soon as the knowledge and the awareness of life passes through the first red lights over the long route (monotony of routine, unfulfilled dreams, the feeling of helplessness, failed relationships and other heartbreaks) on the above-mentioned "Pin Out My Eyes" and more vividly on the following "Rust", whose special guest, the guitar player and singer Dedi Madden, should be a familiar name to Zero 7's fanbase. The touching 14-minutes lasting "Mr. Trebus" got inspired by the true story of Edmund Zygfryd Trebus, a compulsive hoarder whose 515 cubic yards of rubbish included documents of an emotionally moving life that got reported by BBC documentary series A Life of Grime, and prepare the ground for the luminous path of "Time Regained" before this sonic journey get closer to the last cycles as you could imagine...

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