Such is the abstract, ghostly nature of Bill MacKay‘s music that it is perhaps best not to introduce it in musical terms. Something like this might be better: on both his new album Fountain Fire, and Esker (2017), there are many passages, many turns of melodic or harmonic phrasing, that create the same feeling as those moments when some environmental trigger evokes acute and transportive memories of childhood. Perhaps it is a smell, an old tree or building, or even something as vapid as a TV show, that brings on that strange warmth in the gut, and that trance in the mind’s eye.
MacKay’s gentle and inviting songs, which might ostensibly be regarded as dwelling in the folk realm but are far more expansive than that suggests, are an expression of both the sadness and the rejuvenating beauty of time passing – without any flavor of sepia-tinted nostalgia or sentiment.