The hymn-like ‘Icy Paw’ bestows a reverence upon the humble jetty, while ‘The Slow Decline’ returns us to the subject of dashed hope, warning against the lies we tell ourselves: “my mind is all mess with future /can it be that every day you can start anew?” Like many other songs on the album, it is something between love letter and documentary, as it charts tales of the desperate and the lonely, the dead and the immortal. This is distilled in ‘Clifftown’ itself, which is charged with those illuminating, pivotal moments: “the sliding doors, they chatter apart/as if they’re speaking directly to my heart/leave this town, leave this town, you have your chance/but I slip through them and out, into the dark.” The more conversational vignette ‘Nights at the Aquarium’ extols the virtues of daydreaming and small, soft-spoken romance, before the Paul Simonish bounce of ‘The Author of All Things, She Speaks’ boasts another devastating opening line and the record’s most infectious guitar riff. There’s regret and romance in the leaving and the staying alike, but there’s a sense throughout that many of the LP’s characters are at some sort of fork in the road. “London stretches her fingers out,” Boulter sings, as he paints a place within the capital’s grip. It serves as a wakeup call before the relative quiet of the title track. The playful ‘Soft White Belly’ sports pumping drums, chugging electric guitars, Hammond and new wavey synths.
But track two proves there is more to Boulter than just acoustic loveliness. From the resonance of its opening line “these thoughts, they would bury you/if you offered them out loud” to the delicate, rolling banjo and gentle harmonies of the song’s climax, it is four and-a-bit minutes of pure perfection. The acoustic fingerpicking, brushed drums, strings and haunting steel of opener ‘Midnight Movies’ dress the most beautiful and fragile of songs.
With a vocal that is as vulnerable as Neil Young but as English as Nick Drake, M G Boulter has concentrated the promise of his first two records into an extremely accomplished third that marries his poetic lyrics with intricate (but unshowy) guitar playing. For those new to the name, Boulter has been making solo records since 2013, having cut his teeth in various bands and he’s now signed to the independent label Hudson Records, alongside Karine Polwart, Bellowhead and Jenny Sturgeon. As concepts for albums go, faded Essex seaside towns might not be the most likely choice but singer-songwriter M G Boulter has carefully hewn a hugely affecting set of songs from the rocks of Clifftown, a pseudonym for his beloved Southend-on-Sea.