Scott William Urquhart & Constant Follower - Even Days Dissolve (2023)

Much of Even Days Dissolve focuses on the relationship between sound, language and landscape. The new album by guitarist Scott William Urquhart and Constant Follower, the songwriting vehicle of Stirling-based musician Stephen McAll, is bathed in a distinctly Scottish light. Its songs range from carefully observed vignettes to widescreen sonic explorations, all of which have an affinity with the hills and rivers and seas of the duo’s homeland and are rooted in its linguistic and poetic heritage.

Though some of these pieces are entwined with history, they are not constrained by it. There are subtle but highly evocative electronic notes in the gloriously dreamlike opener Waves Crash Here, the modern studio techniques providing the bracing breeze that cuts through Urquhat’s comforting tumble of notes. The mastery of emotional counterpoint and musical texture is immediately but mysteriously compelling, like an old postcard whose writing has faded just beyond comprehension.

The guiding light on this album is the poet Norman MacCaig, whose long career was spent looking with microscopic accuracy at Scotland’s natural landscapes and their relationship to human lives, spiritual and physical. Two of the songs here feature recordings of MacCaig’s poems. Wildlife Cameraman (Summer Farm) is a distillation of MacCaig’s art: earthy but metaphysical, always touched with wry humour and melancholy. Here, spoken and sung, it sounds almost like a more serious Ivor Cutler. Basking Shark, one of MacCaig’s most well-known poems, conjures ‘that room-sized monster with a matchbox brain’ with beautifully interpretive flutters of guitar and brass.

MacCaig’s poetry seeps into the rest of the album too, in subtle, sinuous ways. Watching The Black River Run has a fitting fluidity to it, both in terms of lyrics and the deceptively simple repeating guitar phrases. Featuring the voice of Scottish hip hop artist CRPNTR, the spoken word Ash Wednesday Slow is steeped in an innate understanding of life in wild countryside, haunted by the spirits of dead sheep and the smoke from village chimneys. Song For A Willow Tree and Space Between Stars lay down impressionistic licks – Urquhart is a genuinely masterful guitarist – before the latter gives way to lysergic, weirdly echoing vocals.

Both McAll and Urquhart have used music to come to terms with traumatic events in their own lives, and this album carries an aura of healing in a very real sense: working through emotional and physical hardship first to remember that beautiful things can exist in the world and then to actually create something beautiful. So while it is suffused with melancholy, it is also spiked with joy. The mesmerising title track builds in quietly surprising layers, like a painting that seems to become more intricate the longer you look at it. It can be mildly disconcerting – you never quite know whether to look at the panorama or the details – but this is the nature of art that is born from difficult experience. Once you immerse yourself in Even Days Dissolve, it becomes an immensely rewarding, sensual listen, ripe with understated strength.