Returning Home :: OndaRock Reviews

For those familiar with bands like Friends Again and Love And Money, the name of Paul McGeechan and his band Starless is synonymous with an elegant and romantic chamber-pop tradition. For the Scottish band the third album, “Returning Home”, represents the closing of the circle: Paul McGeechan's project partly returns to its origins, the more traditional arrangements and folk influences re-emerge and elegantly marry with the orchestral scores of the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra , the latter element which has branded the Scottish musician's three albums.

The elegiac, romantic and melody atmospheres of Starless remain faithful to the cinematic suggestions of Craig Armstrong and the noir poetics of Blue Nile. Once again McGeechan's project becomes the opportunity for a reunion of important protagonists of Scottish music, especially of that sophisti-pop scene which conquered audiences and critics at the turn of the new wave.
An album intended for a well-defined circle of Scottish pop lovers, “Returning Home” is a carefully assorted project: the presence of the orchestra is not a superfluous aesthetic decoration, the scores are elaborated as an essential part of the compositions and this is the key time of the success of the always difficult marriage between pop music and orchestra.

With the only regret of not having been able to involve Liz Fraser and Tracey Thorn in the project, Paul McGeechan takes a song from Love And Money's first album, “You're Beautiful”, out of the drawer, entrusting it to the robust voice of the Scottish singer-songwriter Phil Campbell, the latter also involved in the excellent duet with Jerry Burns in “Stepping Out Slowly”, one of the most intense pages of “Returning Home”.
Grahame Skinner of Cowboy Mouth (a band ready to return to the scene with an album in the first months of 2025) offers an unreleased track (“Togheter”), a chamber-pop in perfect Hipsway style, while the singer/actor Roddy Hart tries his hand at one of the most immediate and simple songs on the album, “Suffocate”.
The role of female voices remains fundamental for McGeechan, the intense suggestion of the folk ballad “Gur Milis Morag” is largely thanks to the voice of Kathleen MacInnes, while the faithful presence of Marie Claire Lee keeps high the tension of the elegant and romantically noir “Nothing Left But This”; the other two female protagonists are less important but still relevant: Emily Smith (“High Tide”) and Maeve Mackinnon (“Mo Nighean Donn An T-Sugraidh”).

The icing on the cake of “Returning Home” is undoubtedly the presence of Chris Thompson, a constant in the three Starless albums, this time dealing with a composition in perfect Bathers style, another important piece of a record perhaps destined for a limited number of fans of the Scottish scene – at home it conquered the charts without any effort – but which does not disappoint expectations and completes a trilogy that deserves to be listened to again in its definitive and complete realization.