Movietone: The Sand and the Stars

There’s something about Movietone’s The Sand and the Stars that exudes warmth. In its organic, natural delight, The Sand and the Stars actually feels earth-toned, weathered by the sea, and wavering somewhere between the humid air and the frolicking waves. After releases with thicker sounds and extraneous instrumentation, this album captures Movietone in a scaled-back approach to reveal their music’s most sparse and skeletal moments.

Acoustic guitars and their gentle strummings comprise most of Movietone’s sound, and, when combined with deft jazz-minded compositions and Kate Wright’s hope-inducing vocal whispers, Movietone proves that not only are they at their most frugal, but also their most emotionally poignant. The Sand and the Stars exposes Movietone at their meager essentials not only musically, but also expressively, with songs that drift into your subconscious and sing in your dreams. It seems to augment the peaceful human mind perfectly as its inherent musical counterpart.

As the fourth album from Movietone, The Sand and the Stars undeniably showcases this outfit from Bristol’s ability reveal themselves fully through a stripped-down aesthetic where their songwriting will be exposed in the nude and either triumph or fail. Fortunately, it’s the former as they beautifully weave gentle acoustic-laden songs with meager piano notes and Wright’s shy, yet sweetly haunting vocals.

However, The Sand and the Stars gives us a glimpse not only into Movietone’s most intimate musical moments, but, if you allow yourself, a glimpse also into your own consciousness. The album actually feels as if it’s one with nature — a perfect sonic landscape to accompany you on a walk through the woods or a late night stroll near the ocean.

It’s no surprise, then, that nature is actually an active participant in The Sand and the Stars. More specifically, Movietone hauled their instruments down to a shore where waves murmured and the stars gleaned and recorded much of the album’s material right there on the beach’s soft sand. Furthermore, Movietone also saw it fit to record in other unorthodox locations including warehouses, a steep cliff, and a spacious church. Ultimately, The Sand and the Stars achieves what many aspire to, but ultimately fail at: creating an album seeps into your subconscious with subtlety, but still leaves a profound imprint.