Tiny Ruins – Ceremony (Ursa Minor) (Album Review) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Tiny Ruins has released Ceremony, 11 songs that are “set on the shores of Tāmaki Makaurau’s Manukau Harbour, known to locals as Old Murky,” or so the PR tells me.

There’s nothing murky about Hollie Fullbrook’s singing or the band’s playing on this, the 4^th Tiny Ruins album (5^th if you count the 2015 collaboration with Hamish Kilgour).

While debut album, Some Were Meant For Sea, was essentially a Fullbrook solo affair, Ceremony sounds and feels like a group effort.

That group consists of drummer Alex Freer, Cass Basil on bass and Tom Healy who, in addition to playing electric guitar, takes on the role of producer. All songs are written and sung by Hollie Fullbrook.

Like her first record, the sea (and the shore) play an important part in what we hear here. Songs like Dorothy Bay, Seafoam Green  and The Crab/Waterbaby were written, or at least inspired, by walks along Old Murky during lockdown.

Dogs Dreaming starts the record with Basil’s sliding bass line, some jangly guitar and a shuffling drum beat.

“I took myself away, to the other side of the bay where I’d never been” sings Hollie in her now-familiar, light, airy voice. The song has the record’s catchiest chorus inviting the listener to continue.

“My heart was diving and soaring with the seabirds flashing by” we hear Fullbrook croon dreamily over a solitary guitar on Diving & Soaring.

The mood throughout the record is cozy, comfortable and uncluttered, with Healy adding a bit of a cello here, a piano there or just the sound of Holly softly counting in as on Earthly Things, a delicate song about wild weather, power outage and riding out the storm.

I’m partial to Dear Annie with its sly melodic nod to The Mamas & Papas’ Dedicated To The One I Love and its irresistible “do do do dos”.

Hollie writes about ‘a classic time-loop movie’, but it sounds like she and her Tiny Ruins team have created their own classic, thanks, in part, to old murky.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Marty Duda

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