“The kind of disc that’s liable to start it’s own cult’ – The Guardian (review of Exit Music)

“A beautiful record” – Q (review of ‘Exit Music’)Steven Lindsay was once described by a music magazine as “possibly the greatest undiscovered songwriter in our midst” but with the release of Kite that is set to change. Originally trained at the Glasgow School Of Art and more Damien Hirst than Damien Rice, Lindsay never really intended to be a singer and musician. He toyed with fame briefly in the 1990s with his band The Big Dish and albums like Creeping Up On Jesus and Satellites but it wasn’t until 2004 and his first solo release, Exit Music, that people really began to sit up and take note. Exit Music was one of those rare items, a record instantly recognisable as a classic but also one that grew and grew in the memory leaving an indelible impression in your head. It was adored by critics – The Daily Telegraph called it ‘a quiet, timeless masterpiece’, the Guardian ‘the kind of disc that could start its own cult’, Q ‘ a beautiful record’ – and became an Album Of The Week in both the Times (‘a gorgeously muted wander through an autumnal, nocturnal season’) and the Sunday Times as well as Scotland On Sunday’s Album Of The Year. Latterly described as being ‘so beautiful it could stop the traffic’ Exit Music was also in danger of suffocating under the weight of expectation for a follow up: Steven toured for a few months and then silence.Of course, waiting brings its own sweet reward and whilst the art world continues to suffer from Lindsay’s lack of cooperation, the rest of us can luxuriate in the true work of art that is Kite, "...an electronic masterpiece containing eleven new songs book-ended by two brief instrumentals that is set to elevate Lindsay to the heights he so richly deserves. I use the words elevate and heights advisedly as Lindsay makes reference to more than thirty different euphemistic terms for airborne activity throughout the recording. Just a glance at the track listing – Put Up The Flag, Skywriter, Kite, Catch A Star – might hint at this fact but it is his extraordinarily effortless cover of Pixies’ Monkey Gone To Heaven that really gives the game away: knowing yet naïve, insular yet universal, Lindsay’s sanguine electronic arrangement and stunning vocal performance serve to make this song as meaningful and direct as it could ever hope to be. For the record, Lindsay says that his reason for choosing the song was that he “had been listening to stuff that switched me into music in the first place like Bowie’s Low/Heroes phase, early Roxy Music, post-Punk and things with a strong aesthetic and more of an oblique sensibility. The Pixies song always fell into that category for me.” Lindsay uses delicate string and horn arrangements and the minimum of instrumentation to create some stunning musical landscapes but it is the inner beauty of his sublime, distinctive drool of a voice that makes Kite such a special treat. Pitch perfect but never predictable, on songs like Giving Up The Ghost where Kate Bush appears to have colluded with Lou Reed’s Satellite Of Love, and the John Foxx electronica of Catch A Star, Lindsay’s traffic-stopping larynx appears to be in full flight. And on the latter, where Lindsay asks that we ‘get in the plane/fly to the moon/catch me a star’ we are in familiarly airborne territory.

When Aldous Huxley took mescaline, it was the sense of infinite detail that overwhelmed him and as he looked down at the folds of his trousers he remarked “what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity.” Listening to Kite has a similar effect – layer upon layer of reality is exposed and one is left with a world of ideas and unrealised dreams. On the song Kite itself, Lindsay observes ‘Nobody wants to take the reins or take the blame/ You turn on the TV and the news is all the same/Could somebody close their eyes and make it go away - tonight/You might as well fly a kite and sail up to the moon’ and you think, hell, why not, we can all but dream.

The full track-listing for Kite runs as follows: Hairshirt, Put Up The Flag, Skywriter, Monkey Gone To Heaven, The Flood, Kite, Metropolis, Deep, Giving Up The Ghost, Catch A Star, A Memory, Light Sleep, Motorcade.

Kite is a beautiful, beautiful record. Let it flSteven Lindsay