Hidden Shoal Re-Issues Tangled Star's Our Man in Eden Hill

April 22, 2009 - PRLog -- The Australian music label Hidden Shoal Recordings today announced the CD re-issue of Our Man in Eden Hill by the Craig Hallsworth-led Australian outfit Tangled Star.

Our Man in Eden Hill sees Tangled Star building on their brilliant debut outing through Hidden Shoal, It’s Now or Later. Musically the EP toys with the frayed edges of country, pop and indie, while in part infusing a sense of space and possibility familiar to fans of the classic Dark Side of the Moon.

As with their debut EP, Our Man in Eden Hill’s surface often belies its musical and emotional interior. Through its gentle shifts and directed detours, the EP manages to make once familiar territory foreign and offset. As chief songwriter and lyricist Craig Hallsworth (The Slow Beings, Healers, Outstation) explains,

“If these songs are simple, they are only apparently so. To me, they are only beginning to really work when they are able to express a space of becoming... There are strange warnings and advice, mysterious imperatives and entreaties... I see the lyrics as working for and against themselves, as well as for and against the music, generating a plane of momentary, shifting affective states. There is comic desperation folded into offhand profundity. There is something depressing and defeating suddenly transformed into a rare kind of pleasure and privilege. There are secrets with nothing to hide. There is one last chance after another…”

The wonderfully received first single lifted from the EP’s original release, ‘tosleepingpeople’, is a lilting pop classic and sees Tangled Star at their inimitable best. The song layers gorgeously crafted, country-tinged melancholic pop with Hallsworth’s wonderfully wry lyrical playfulness.

“The rich, gentle roil of sound evidenced on Our Man in Eden Hill has the same surging, warmly anthemic sound of stellar forebears galore, each sonically different — the Triffids, Died Pretty, perhaps most inevitably the Go-Betweens — but which altogether seem to capture a sense and a style more than might be guessed, something detailed, mournful, and a little crushing even at its strongest; feedback and background flows of classic keyboards and steady drumming all interplaying behind lead singer Craig Hallsworth’s work. By putting it all together and adding their own touches — the suddenly thrilling funk/psych guitar shades on ‘The Skaters,’ for instance — Tangled Star help make a claim on something more than re-creation.”
Ned Raggett, All Music Guide

Our Man in Eden Hill is now available on CD through Hidden Shoal’s distributor n5Mailorder. The album is also available through all good digital stores, including iTunes, Amazon, eMusic and the HSR Store. Check the Hidden Shoal Store for all distribution and availability details.

Hidden Shoal Recordings is an Australia-based independent music label that has earned a reputation for releasing exciting and engaging new independent music that is not bound by genre or style. Hidden Shoal Recordings was chosen as one of the top 10 favourite labels of 2007 by Textura magazine and has been dubbed “This generation’s 4AD” by prominent New York radio host DJ Mojo.

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Hidden Shoal Recordings is an Australia-based music label that has earned a reputation for releasing engaging new music that is not bound by genre or style. The label has been dubbed “This generation’s 4AD” by prominent New York radio host DJ Mojo.