Album Review: Mark With The Sea - 13 Years

18 July 2013 | 5:19 pm | Lorin Reid

Mark With The Sea has an accomplished, deep, round the campfire growl and some nice guitar accompaniment but he’s taken on too much with additional instruments and his songwriting needs a bit more time to ripen

Mark With The Sea aka Marc Oswin hasn't changed much in the past 13 years. This debut collection – a DIY gathering of sparse folk tunes recorded in his shed between 2006 and 2012 – follows the same soft, acoustic thread across its nine brief tracks.

Oswin's lyrics have an odd rhythm and don't quite fit the length of their lines (maybe that's quirky?), and with a pleasant hint of electric guitar but some frankly feeble harmonica, I'm not sure this album ever quite hits the… mark.

Opening track, Tonight, is simple and haunting, with some wavering organ and foreboding vocals on the chorus, while the lyrics on Appearances Can Be Deceiving are a great example of raw storytelling in a confronting, soul-baring, surreal kind of way. “Your best friend took his headache pills and picked his razor up off of the shelf/And all of this time you're just sitting at home thinking everything is swell,” he croons with a warm Aussie twang.

World's Heaviest Heart is reminiscent of Kimya Dawson's homebrewed tunes, only Oswin sticks to straight melancholy and adds the refreshing tinkling of something like glockenspiel. Guest vocalist Renae McCarty-Ferguson steps in on Complex Chemistry and although their voices mesh nicely as they sing in harmony on the chorus, it's hard to ignore the crude keyboard ad libs at the forefront of the mix.

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The album peaks at the end with Spark Archer, which nails the unexpected, dissonant melody and sounds tighter and more polished than other tracks.

Mark With The Sea has an accomplished, deep, round the campfire growl and some nice guitar accompaniment but he's taken on too much with additional instruments and his songwriting needs a bit more time to ripen. Bring on the next 13.