James Vincent McMorrow: Get Low

Get Low;

You can see the progression from his original work to this track – the slow development and introduction of electronic elements to his work. The progression is obvious when you’ve been introduced to it from the beginning – from his first album Early in the Morning, which focused it’s musicality around his guitar where it exploited his picking. It’s slightly unexpected when you listen in the opposite direction as he evolves from acoustic, singer-songwriting contemporary folk to his contemporary electronic? For a music student, it’s bad that I always struggle with genre-ing musical works – to a certain extent anyway.

His musicality slowly developed throughout his albums with his falsetto being introduced on ‘Post Tropical’ and has stuck ever since making it a defining characteristic that you now almost expect from his music. Post Tropical was the biggest change so far where he started experimenting with other styles and other ways of broadening the parts of his work, the main change was the introduction of electronics.

Get Low follows from Post Tropical with electronic beats, synths and the pixelated textures edited into his backing vocals. McMorrow has slowly pushed away from the acoustic sides of music, in this track especially so with an electric guitar, raw with depth, introducing the track that parallels through the parts with lush guitar lines and solos in the bridges. It once again slowly builds up the parts and introduces the chorus straight away with his backing vocals before bringing in the beat that drives the song forward.

In all honesty, when he brought out How To Waste A Moment – his first single after Post Tropical – it was disappointing. Post Tropical is an ineffable album that demonstrates how much artistry he has as a musician and how he took a risk with straying from his original musical style. McMorrow demonstrated, quite clearly, that artists are capable of having that level of versatility within their work – that they can quite easily stray away from their comfort zone and still keep producing brilliant works and make that new area another new comfort zone for them. How To Waste A Moment didn’t feel as though it lived up to the standard of his capabilities, however Get Low does.

His new album, We Move, was just released yesterday (2^nd September) and if it’s anything like Get Low we have a lot to look forward to.