The funky folk of Say makes for an easy, accessible way to get hooked on Budgee’s second E.P. It’s a track that I could imagine crossing over to a sunset / chillout crowd. It was this song that first drew me in. The Glasgow group’s core duo, of Celine Brooks and Gareth Dickson – the latter formerly a member of Vashti Bunyan’s band – wrote and recorded the 5 pieces as their 8 year romantic relationship fell apart. The words are, unsurprisingly, concerned with love’s ups, downs, ins and outs. Woven highs, lows, and woes. These mixed and confused emotions giving the release its title, Pell-Mell – a phrase whose dictionary definition is “A disorderly situation or collection of things.” The music is bolstered by Robyn Dawson’s violin and Owen Curtis Williams’ drums. The mix rich with reverb and echo. Amid the acoustic strumming, poignant plucking, on the melancholy Nothing Comes, an electric tremolo leaves vapour trails. I’m The Mouth spins a 6-string waltz. Cymbals crashing, and the guitar, Johnny Marr-like in places. The tight, taut repetition like a more “organic”, female-fronted, Twilight Sad. Keep You In Mind has a hypnotic, trance-inducing, instrumental second half. 

The highlight, however, is the opening, title track, which I’ve had on repeat, since it struck a real, personal, chord. Alt-edged fiddle and drones in with the cool, country-fied picking, and loose, rocking rhythm, the song’s a serenade to moving forward. To taking each blow, that simply being lands, on the chin, while striving for a life less ordinary within existence’s eternal, universal, cycle. Learning, growing, taking something positive from every heartbreak. Jaunty, “Forever jumping, changing.” Celine’s cadence recalling Iron & Wine’s classic, The Trapeze Swinger, as she leaps from line to line. 

Budgee’s Pell-Mell can be ordered directly from Bandcamp.