Posted 11:28 PM by sport

Courtesy of David Garland (who will recieve today's "Eagle Eye" award: a Scott Walker compilation and another, "omnibus" cdr with Viv Stanshall and others), a new review for Uncle. This is from a brilliant and perceptive person named Tyler Ritter, who personifies all that is good and wise in humanity. Tyler Ritter is a writer with rare gifts of perception and craft... we can all take a cue from Ritter's example, and thereby become better listeners and finer people. I don't know Tyler Ritter, but I wish I did, and know that I could only be enriched by such an acquaintance.

Sport Murphy’s third album, Uncle, is a wonderfully
strange, funny, sweet and sad offering that is incredibly
diverse musically. Of the 22 songs here no two are alike.
The liner notes (and press release) put the music
contained on it into context—Murphy’s nephew Peter
Vega, who was raised with his family as his little brother,
was one of many New York City firemen who died saving
lives on September 11th. That said, this album is nothing
like any music written in connection with the
tragedy—there are no protest songs, no searches for
answers, no "let’s roll" dogma. Murphy doesn’t make it his
purpose to comment on the tragedy—he has opted to
deal with the loss of his surrogate brother by creating
something that he thinks that he would’ve enjoyed. The
results can best be described as beautifully and purely
childlike—the songs are divided by tapes that Murphy and
his brother made when they were children.


Musically Michael "Sport" Murphy could be described as similar in sound to Smog
without the distancing self-irony and satiric self-absorption. Oh and without the
sloth-like deadpan voice. Murphy has long been a conjurer of some of music’s
most overlooked artists—Charles Ives, Stephen Foster and Glen Campbell—as
well as Scott Walker and Brian Wilson who you rarely see mentioned in the
same sentence. The lilting "No Fair" and the barroom jazz ballad "Everybody’s
Gone" are the only songs that are solely about his loss—the former’s lyrics
vaguely depicting a forlorn narrator in search of an after-hours bar. Not much
to go on, but there isn’t much more that needs to be said.

The rest of the album is playful in its stylistic shifts—nearly every song is a
complete departure from the previous one. From the balladic "Late Days of
Summer" and "The Sound of Her Voice," to the crooning "Sleepy River," the
noirish "Played By Linda Blair," the childlike abandon of "Frogs Are Singing"
(which features the most unlikely hook possibly ever with "Frogs are
singing/Fuck ‘em, fuck ‘em") and "Paul LaGrutta" somehow Murphy keeps the
stylistic changes strong and heart-felt.

This is a wonderful gift of an album packed tight with gems. Few pieces of
music so cohesively nail the nature of being human as this record does. In his
liner notes Murphy claims this to be his "inadequate gift" to his lost brother, but
after listening to it it’s quite clear that he’s being awfully hard on himself. It’s a
more than adequate gift to whomever is lucky enough to discover this album.

http://www.fmsound.net/IndieScene/NewReviews/Sport%20Murphy/Sport%20Murphy.html