Seven Cities of Gold is a sense of stumbling into open moorland at the loss of daylight, the breeze blowing stories that were in existence long before draw lines came to be made. The voice of Julie July is crystalline and controlled over the terrain, unhurried yet compelling, and pulls you towards it like distant flame that drags you through the increasing darkness. Her delivery is so legendarily deep as though she is guiding you to a shiny edge that always goes slightly out of reach of your fingertips.
Then up comes the whole band: the acoustic guitars shining like silver on a running wave, the electric strings spiralling and flickering like storms surging over distant hills, and those five-part harmonies floating in like messages of lost times. The passages of the guitar are floating along with gracefully gentle restraint--reverberations of old fingerpicking, yet more familiar and less harsh--images of vast wayside and of legends half melted away by the ages. Every twist to the composition is like finding another page in the storey that you are terrified of reading because you think it will come to an end.
I have felt it in my headphones when walking in the city at midnight, and suddenly all the noise of the city disappeared--there was only dusty tracks beneath my feet, and the magnetism of something good on the other side of the next swell. It bears the spirit of the British folk-rock and the film longing of the masters of the harmony of the West Coast, but it is completely modern. It has adventure courses alright, but it has that sadness of knowing that some things, you can only find on the road, and never have in the house.
By the time the closing notes have died away I stand paralysed in the middle of the street with my eyes closed and am almost assured that I am inhaling woodsmoke and seawater. The Julie July band has not just written a song, they have broken a door into a world that is wild and undated. I continue passing through that doorway, indefinitely, and it does not want to close behind me.
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