Still Corners – The Last Exit

Music is great!
But mine copy has delivery deffects: star-shaped scratch left by piece of vinyl on my favorite "white sands" :(
Overall sounds good.

Nice pressing - depth and warmness to it. Bass sounds much better then the streaming services portrayed

The best sounding (though perhaps not the best, musically) Still Corners LP to date, very clean quiet vinyl with excellent dynamics. Side B is a bit more subdued than side A bit they generally commit to a mood across the album. Definitely some Chris Isaak influences here as well, beautiful arrangements!

I can easily daydream to this.. Treble at 3 o'clock. Do yourself a favour and listen to this record with a good set of stereo headphones

Very clean pressing. Mine came with a hand written note.
I'm not here to critique the album however.

Far too many listeners are being drawn in by the overly flowered reviews for this dream laden collection of songs, where I’m not suggesting that you won’t enjoy this album, though since this is my review, I’m saying that aside from a couple of numbers, that I’m deeply unimpressed.

Last Exit is being flooded with so many praises that it’s nearly impossible not to find yourself hitting the ‘Purchase Now’ button, then dancing from one foot to the other, waiting on this ominous bit of coloured vinyl to find its way to your door; though how this darkly pastoral ambient country manifestation is gong to hold up over time is anyone’s guess. Like their other outings, Last Exit does offer up some wastedly intoxicating gems, simply consider “The Last Exit” or “Mystery Road,” both laid back bits of couch-bound splendor, though certainly not enough for me to justify the need to slide this vinyl into my collection, leaving the band to venture down their imaginary hazed desert highway taking some expectedly beautiful side roads.

With the album being a couple of sunbaked steps above lo-fi, their direction, bridges and chord structures are far too easy to anticipate, leaving me to feel that I’ve been out here on this musical highway far too long, where seldom is something new offered up that I’ve not heard before, and in many cases far better. The album comes off as if it were a soundtrack to some movie that never got made, yet methinks that’s only a descriptor placed on this body of work because nothing else fits. Why so many are attempting to imply that this is a road trip album is beyond me, certainly the album is darkly atmospheric, infused with delicious synths, sultry in its way, and from afar, lightly embracing … as Still Corners never actually embrace their listeners, nor do they offer a door to walk through, only a postcard from an imagined distant part of the American southwest for one to ponder. On top of that, if I’m informed by one other listener who deeply embraces this outing (which is just fine), that it’s all a trippy dream-pop take on “Wild At Heart” or “Twin Peaks,” I many just have to turn on my heels and go back to bed for a couple of years.

I live in the southwest, New Mexico to be exact, I appreciate mystic thunder in the mountains, cars that have been turning to rust on back country roads for forty years, along with half standing stone homes, ghosts still peering through the broken windows, it’s all so magical, so other worldly, where here Still Corners do present one with the ability to capture haunting splendor, it’s just that the distance between those memorable moments, those memorable songs and atmospheric splendor are far too far apart.

All of this of course leaves me to continue collecting the songs from Still Corners that ride best in my back pocket. You wanna Still Corners gem, collect these individual songs from their catalog and you will be rightfully happy: "Static," "It's Voodoo," "In the Middle of the Night," "Mystic Road," "Black Lagoon," "Last Exit" and "Message".

*** The Fun Facts: As to the band name, and it is a splendid name, Tessa Murray claims that while reading the poem "New Hampshire" by Robert Frost, that she came across the words/phrase 'Still Corners', striking her as a perfect representation of the band's music.

Review by Jenell Kesler