MINOR GOLD – WAY TO THE SUN: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- Jul 22
- 3 min read
MINOR GOLD
Way To The Sun (Minor Gold/MGM)
THE ODDEST THING to observe here on the second album from on-and-offstage duo, Tracy McNeil and Dan Parsons, is the visions that darken the horizon. Odd because you could think this was a time of endless cloudless sky for the pair.
A late-arriving love, after years as bandmates and friends in Tracy McNeil & The Good Life, led to this smaller-bodied but no less ambitious songwriting/singing partnership. And boy has it paid off for the Canadian-in-Australia McNeil and the Queenslander-in-Australia Parsons. Not just personally but professionally, with the pair spending most of the past few years in extreme close quarters in the US and Canada, to rising numbers at shows, more festival invitations, positive reviews, and this album recorded at the impossibly (but so California) named Ultimate Hair Farm studio in Glendale.
Such a response from the locals is as it should be given Minor Gold’s musical and emotional home is on the western side of the USA – think California, Oregon, Arizona, Texas – where ‘70s country/rock shuffles, built-into-each-other harmonies, a wistful look at the setting sun, a hopeful turn to the rising one, and nimble-fingered picking have always thrived. And thrived in the warmth of the air that can’t help but buttress any pain.
It's got to be sunshine and good times everywhere for our intrepid travellers, right? Look at that sky!
But as Jackson Browne and James Taylor might tell us – and as Browne and Taylor clearly imprinted on McNeil and Parsons during their impressionable listening years – the heat can wither, the sun can burn, and it can hide some things in the shadows. Maybe while you are busy looking at that sky.
Take Moonlight Silver Highway, whose musical and lyrical setting is “in the half-light shadow and the sleepy drone” as “I’m trying to leave this town, once again”. It is the wiry acoustic guitar as much as the wan pedal steel that sets the tone of empty space and uncertain prospects, but it is the entwined voices inability that never resolves which remove any doubt that staying or going isn’t going to change anything because the emptiness is inside.
In Break It Fake It – which could be Simon & Garfunkel in pearl-button shirts, or Seals and Croft in spurs – there is a more certain momentum, a definite sense of the road opening out. However, the boot of this car is carrying some emotional baggage, the question of “Why’d you have to break it/Why’d you have to say it out loud?” holding back escape. And Handstand, a Springsteenish, low living in the badlands tale, seemingly puts a brake on it all together: the sky much lower and the walls closing in on their voices, the sad-eyed violin accepting defeat, much like the line “Only so much you can talk through baby/Only so much we can well-define/It’s in the doing that is gonna getcha”.
But point the car one way and there is an escape of sorts, even if it’s temporary, even if it’s illusory … even if you know it is temporary and illusory. “Let it all hang out of the window/A dream flapping in the wind/Decapitated by the mailbox baby/We’ll find a way to win.”
Occasionally, Way To The Sun does look up and feel the warmth on its face. The title and opening track, may be stuck in some nondescript urban setting, where “buildings shine but you’re always in the shade,” but it has its heart set elsewhere, somewhere in real light where you can “let my skin go brown, let it hold my soul”. With a little shuffle, some liquid electric guitar and a hopeful tone in the voices, McNeil and Parsons dream a little dream.
Though even up-looking moments can be as much imagination willing as reality arriving. In the S.Nicks-goes-country Lighter Shade Of Blue – tumbleweed rhythm, canyon languor vocals, almost a coo in the background – the dream gets close enough to maybe, just maybe, counteract the potential to “drown inside my mind”. In the case of Pretty Peggy – which could easily take place in Winslow, Arizona, and definitely is loosening its load – the pursuit of the impossible feels like a small triumph.
Open roads look like the ideal, endless summer the promise we want fulfilled, but maybe Way To The Sun is a cautionary tale from McNeil and Parsons that you don’t ever outrun the shadow.
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Way to The Sun is out on Friday, July 25.
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