White Marble Heyday: 2011 album with Jonathan Brain, Harry Kneen, Daniel Marano, Sam Scherr, Lily Sumich and Lorraine Sumich
Benedict's sixth album, entitled White Marble Heyday, will be released in October 2011. The new album features Benedict's four-piece band, as well as long-term collaborator Jonathan Brain, and guitarist Daniel Marano.
Download White Marble Heyday from the Bandcamp website now
Harry Kneen - bass
Sam Scherr - electric guitar and backing vocal
Lily Sumich - drums
Lorraine Sumich - keyboards and backing vocal
Jonathan Brain - electric, acoustic and nylon string guitars
Daniel Marano - electric guitar
Benedict Moleta - acoustic guitar, nylon string guitar and singing
Click here to listen to the track Salmon Brick.
The album was recorded, engineered and mastered by Alan Smith.
Some album reviews are below.
The West Australian:
Perth's quiet achiever has once again lived up to his prolific tag with a second 13-track effort in as many years, after 2010's Timesheet.
White Marble Heyday plays out in two halves, the first dominated by the minimalism of Moleta and Jonathan Brain on some textural lead parts and a second half punctuated by more of the full band sound that has characterised his recordings and live shows of recent years. Both generate plenty of highlights, and Moleta's wonderful turn of phrase is as observant and incisive as ever.
HQ-HZ wonders "Are you trying to ape the confidence you had as a child," before swelling into the record's most rousing moment. Thickening generously addresses "one of those people that they say is ageing gracefully". And when Moleta "jumped ship' and "ended up in a condemned flat under the Sheraton" on Salmon Brick, there's something so uniquely local about it that you'll want to drive past and take a look.
Rave Magazine:
If the average human being had even the most rudimentary ability to play guitar and write whimsical poetry like Benedict Moleta, photo albums would probably be of little use. Thankfully, we are vain as a human species and can't play much good music off the bat. This makes Moleta a very unique kind of guy, a photographer of Perth suburbia, and ultimately an important contributor to the Western Australian music scene as he continues to involve other musicians with his work. He even runs his own homebaked songwriters' club.
Sure, his style doesn't vary much - his softly spoken nuances are just like Belle & Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch's (minus the whole Scottish thing), and his thought-stream prose could easily by a by-product of the same cloud of joint smoke that birthed Joanna Newson's Sawdust And Diamonds. I guess what I'm really trying to say is, will somebody nominate this guy Australian of the Year already?
Drum Media:
White Marble Heyday is another chapter in the Benedict Moleta canon and, yet again, speaks to the human experience with remarkable insight and intimacy.
Photo by Darren Clayton.