Live Reviews

A singer and his songs

Alexi Murdoch, Great Scott, February 8th

By CAITLIN E. CURRAN | February 12, 2007

Alexi Murdoch

Alexi Murdoch’s music has been used for a plethora of TV shows and film. And for good reason. The Scottish singer-songwriter writes tunes with a beautiful and familiar simplicity — familiar, perhaps, because he follows in the tradition of Bob Dylan, Nick Drake, and Elliott Smith, but with a more positive outlook and less in the way of social commentary. “Keep your head above water/But don’t forget to breathe,” he sings on the second track of his debut album, Time Without Consequence (Zero Summer). On “Orange Sky” — his best-known tune thanks to The OC — he finds the kind of salvation in love that romantics dream of after enduring the “long road we’ve been walking on.” It may not be a new idea, and his musical stylings are far from innovative, but that didn’t keep him from captivating a crowd last Thursday at Great Scott. The twentysomethings who packed the bar were so intent, you could hear the ice clinking as the bartender mixed cocktails, even if you were just a few feet from the stage. Fans laughed as he joked about technical difficulties, and when he asked them to “just fucking sing your heart out,” they did just that.

Joel Shearer, from the LA band Pedestrian, played on Murdoch’s self-released Four Songs EP, and for the first half of the set he accompanied Murdoch on acoustic guitar. Then the opening act, Midnight Movies, joined in for some plugged-in, mildly psychedelic rock. What was missing was encore material. Four Songs came out in 2002; Time Without Consequence didn’t follow till four years later. And Murdoch prefaced the one new song by warning us, “It’s not really done yet” — a sign that the next album may be a long time coming.

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