Roy Montgomery
Scenes From The South Island

I have always had a soft spot for Roy Montgomery.

His “aquatic” guitar playing where notes expand like circular waves produced by a stone thrown into a pond, his psychedelic eclecticism that allows him to range across various styles without ever losing his unmistakable timbre, the variety and quality of collaborations with other artists that over the years have given life to authentic masterpieces.

“Scenes From the South Island” was the first album (instrumental) of his solo career and it is a true tribute and declaration of love to the southern islands of his homeland: New Zealand.

Almost like a painter who, before setting off on a long journey around the world, gathers his watercolors and oil on canvas in an album to show people of other nations his roots, the pieces of the album seem like so many landscapes in which Montgomery's skillful impressionist brush has transfigured the nature of his motherland, presenting it to us first of all as an inexhaustible source of emotions and sensations.

“Along the Main Divide” and “Clear Night, Port Hills” are liquid pantheistic hymns permeated by an ancestral sound full of nuances that make the contours of things elusive and vague.

Roy takes us by the hand with the delicate arpeggio of “Rainshadow Near Christchurch” that tries to make its way through a thick fog and then leaves us at the mercy of the enveloping gusts of the short “Downtown to Vesuvio.”

The journey continues with the splendid “Twilight Conversation”: a hypnotic religious psalm of 10 minutes where, on a catacombal cadence, Roy paints guitar arabesques that seem to be the secret language of stones, trees, and all those natural elements that have been trying to communicate with the human race for millennia.

“Escape Velocity” is the "philosophical" piece of the batch: just as our thoughts and ideas on any concept are almost never totally clear and crystalline, but are punctually distorted or “tainted” by the pharisaic everyday life or by other mental musings that inadvertently arise, here the linear guitar riff is continuously disturbed and deformed by counterpoints that seem to be incessant and uncontrolled synapses.

In the album, Montgomery then ranges from the short blues of “The Barracuda Sequence” and the similar-folk of “Rain Receding” to reach the thunderousness and granitic nature of the bardian “The Road to Diamond Harbour” and “Winding it Out in the High Country.”

The end of the journey comes with “Nor’ Wester Head-on/The Last Kakapo Dreams of Flying”: an intimate and melancholic fresco where Roy seems to breathe a gust of deep gratitude towards the southern islands that fades away and disappears in bubbles of soap.

A personal and varied album, “Scenes From the South Island” does not reach the heights of other works by Roy (both as a solo artist and in collaborations), but it has an atavistic and secret appeal that with each listen captures and reveals ever new things.