(3/6/5) 025: Winter Aid - Holy Mary
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It's been some decade for Shane Culloty, the face, brains, and heart behind Winter Aid. He released his debut full-length back in 2017, shared the 10th anniversary edition of his debut EP, The Wisp Sings, just a few months ago. He's also relocated from Dublin to California and, amid all of that, accidentally and absolutely surprisingly racked up over one billion plays of the title-track to the aforementioned EP after the song went viral on TikTok.
Six years on from that first album, The Murmur of the Land - one of my favourite records of all time - Culloty finally returns this week with the release of a new album called Pull The Sky Inside. Formed of 15 new songs, the record is a spellbinding journey through various shades of grey, a beautiful reflection on relocation, isolation, love and loss. As all the best things are.
Lending the record even greater weight, Pull The Sky Inside was produced by the excellent Chuck Johnson (Daniel Bachman, Claire Rousay) and Larry Crane, known chiefly for his work with Elliott Smith, as well as Cat Power, Sleater Kinney, Stephen Malmus and plenty more rock royalty.
"It's sunnier than the last album (I live in California now) and also angrier (I live in California now)," Shane told us ahead of the album's release. "At some point I embraced a simpler kind of songwriting, which I think mostly comes across."
And indeed it does.
Despite the additional light that creeps in the album still, notably and pertinently, drips with sadness, a heavy towel around the neck. The production is gorgeous throughout, the music finding new shapes and colours from what's come before, and Culloty drapes his brooding, weighty voice over the whole thing in ways that feels intoxicating, often overwhelming.
It wastes barely a second across its long running time, and from the oily ether of initial listens, it was 'Holy Mary' that stopped me in my tracks. Introduced by a soft acoustic guitar and a dark-of-night vocal, it makes for a transfixing unravelling; a four minutes of swirling, ghostly voices and sumptuous instrumentation that threatens to shatter - or perhaps quietly and slowly disintegrate - at any given moment.
It doesn't, of course, because despite it all, Culloty has always found a way to slip willowy strands of hope into his work, to look for light when you once wondered if you'd ever see such a thing again.
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