REVIEW: I was born by the sea
I was born by the sea
Richie Culver
REIF
review by George Francis Lee
The malaise of being born to a town where there’s no money and there’s nowt on is perhaps the great communal baggage of the British under-50s. Bookies. Jobcentres. Daytime tele. These are all postcards from Richie Culver’s hometown of Hull. But these pictures are hardly unique to the old Humberside; they are everywhere, in every last town from top to bloody bottom. It’s an indictment of our times that, with all the muck and the mess that is explored in I was born by the sea, so much of it is incredibly familiar.
Culver adopts many of the same stylistic tendencies of the UK’s experimental/electronic canon: sparse, skeletal tracks with very little to hold your hand. It is not so much here where I was born by the sea finds so much of its resonant power, but somewhere amidst the artist’s East Yorkshire accent – where his lingering vowels lend an effortless poetry to even the simplest of lines.
Quips like “Hardest working man in the Jobcentre” are as biting as they are simplistically formed, repeated like a living room mantra aimed at dulling the ache of a depressive episode or a life of unfulfilled potential. There’s little hope elsewhere in tracks like “Pigeon Flesh,” which describes a late night account of a dog ravishing the corpse of a pigeon, or the noisy washing machine ballad of “Clenched Jaw”. And yet, the whole thing closes off with a song of catharsis – the title track and by far the strongest in concept and execution. Starting off in sole spoken word, it evolves into a meditative, undulating drone. It conjures memories of quayside daydreaming, where the sea pours up to a land totally outside of everything you know – far beyond the diving gulls, the shimmering oil rigs. Yes, you may have been born by the sea, but you’ll do anything to get away from it.
***
Richie Culver
Released: November 11, 2022
Available on 12” LP and Digital
Original Tracks by Richie Culver
Released on REIF