Beneath Strawberry Moons (Dinked Edition #357)

Wind-tousled life on the east coast of Scotland, the unhurried cultivation of sound and the tender hope that everything might be alright in the end combine to enchant on Gulp’s latest album Beneath Strawberry Moons, the combined inspirations of Lindsey Leven and Guto Pryce are supplemented by the musicianship of Andrew Wasylyk as the stomach-butterflies of optimism flutter around and the lapping foams of the band’s ethereal, folkish psych-pop.   

Musician and multi-media artist, Leven rejoins Pryce, who traces faintly around the simmering offbeat sounds of his life as a Super Furry Animal (as well as part of Das Koolies and The Pictish Trail), and supporting bandmates, Gid Goundrey (guitar) and Stuart Kidd (drums), for Gulp’s third album. The nine-track Beneath Strawberry Moons, released via ELK Records, follows their 2014 debut, Season Sun, released with Sonic Cathedral and the acclaimed All Good Wishes, which arrived four years later. Extending the gestation of a complete, new collection of work to seven years, accounting for the pair’s relocation from Pryce’s native Cardiff, Beneath Strawberry Moons emerges as a minimal-carbon-footprint, hyperlocal album, created amongst friends with no deadlines between Piggery Studio and the duo’s garden cabin in North East Fife.  

Describing their surrounds as ‘idyllic’ and responding artistically to the significant life change, that has brought energy and release, Leven describes the album as “in the most part a love letter to this new way of life”, celebrating space, love, connection and time, cut with an underlying awareness of the fragility of this beauty. Having leaked new material, the cinematic showdown of Always So Far, back in May, the choice of Hope Shines Through The Haar as Gulp’s first single since 2018 links the pair’s delicately charged sense of abundant possibility, Scotland’s heritage and their bracing proximity to the sea. 

Side A

1.     Sea Bear

2.     Always So Far

3.     Salt Years

4.     Hope Shines Through the Haar

5.     The Way We Live

Side B

6.     Wildflower

7.     Summer Storm

8.     Someday In a City

9.     Ultramarine Blue