Troubadour extraordinaire Mark Moldre is on the cusp of releasing his highly successful crowd-funded album ‘Nambucca Fables’, and we are honoured to be able to bring you an exclusive listen to one of the tracks off the album, ‘New Suit’, accompanied by a gorgeously rich video.
Moldre’s voice is yearning and melodic above an intricate spider web of crystalline guitars (with a contribution from indie legend Jamie Hutchings, ex-Bluebottle Kiss and more recently Infinite Broke).
Moldre has an innate ability to reflect an antipodean lustre in his songs – the sounds of the outback and the imagery of the clear blue expansive skies: a widescreen palette that positively glows and burns like a spark. His stories are deeply personal and yet resonate profoundly with the human condition. The slide guitars weep gently underneath the track, creating a buoyancy and flow.
The track was born in the aftermath of Moldre’s mother Dulcie Moldre’s passing as Moldre attends her funeral. It’s a period of personal grief and loss from which a filtered ray of fortitude and resilience emerges, as the lines your love will live forever more are repeated. The lyrics recall W.H. Auden with their call for the world to take notice of the loss – I told the birds not to sing.
Moldre says of the inspiration:
You just want that day to end. You go through the motions. People speak to you and you don’t really hear what they’re saying. You become a ghost for a day, wandering from group to group of mourners but not really engaging. A grey hallucination in a New Suit.
There is a quite fortitude in the delivery and a melody and majestic framework that echoes songwriters as astute and eloquent as Moldre: Mark Oliver Everett from The Eels, Elvis Costello or Bruce Springsteen. This is a track that is heartbreakingly beautiful in its capture of loss and its quiet celebration of memory and love.
Filmed by Jo Moldre and directed and edited by Mark Moldre, the accompanying black and white clip features the titular suit and follows Moldre’s lonely journey where it ends at Moldre’s childhood home. At journey’s end, we see the moving scene of his father Ain Moldre playing the accordion alone on the drive. It is incredibly moving and perfectly captures the sense of discombobulation and loneliness everyone experiences with the loss of a loved one:
Moldre has a magical capacity to express the universal fugue of sadness in his songwriting and in the process deliver something that sees light and hope through everlasting memories and love.
‘New Suit’ is out tomorrow (28 March 2023) and will be available on Bandcamp (see below) and all the usual streaming services. ‘Nambucca Fabels’ is out on 14 April 2023 and can be pre-ordered through the link below:
Feature Photograph: Jared Harrison
