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Outside In(fluence): Myles Morgan - "Fool" single review

Myles Morgan is a member of London's indie/psychedelic/somewhat-shoegaze-ish rockers Young Native. He contacted me about reviewing his debut solo single, "Fool" out of the blue aether last week. I honestly didn't know what to make of it at first glance, but I was pleasantly surprised with the track after giving it a listen.


First off, the cover art looks very much like something from around 2001; I'm thinking Radiohead's OK Computer or William Gibson's novel from 2003, Pattern Recognition. There's that early 2000s blue, the fade of the city, shadowed, and the text small in the corner scrawled out and choppy. This, and the mention of it being a solo album, had me thinking that this must be something acoustic. It's not.

Starting with a whisper of guitar creeping in thru small quarters, "Fool" soon comes into a dub/jazz/rock heart-to-heart. It's over it seems; he won't be seeing that person anymore. The guitar slithers with indigo scales. The chorus comes in strong, perhaps betraying the rest of the structure going hard into pop. We go into a spooky ambiance dub that fades off before the musick comes in like ten tons of earth. The fuzzy bass is the best thing, and those haunting horns calling out from a marshland portray the singer's failure. The chorus makes sense within the structure of the whole thing. And, at the end, the musick disappears back into the haunted marshland.

"Fool" is a great track! I was very, very surprised since I was going in totally blind, but I really like it. It's like, very, very produced, and the layers are impressive. It's not badly overproduced like Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. The single comes off a similar sound to something made by The Good, the Bad, & the Queen, a band that does the dreary rock thing with a little too much polish that still works. This might beat that though. "Fool" receives a Good, and I am very excited to hear more of Myles' solo tracks when they fall from the blue aether.

You can find a link to purchase or stream the track here, and Myles Morgan is on Facebook here. Those in the UK can catch him on January 25th and February 15th in London. I'll still be here in Pittsburgh, for better or worse. In regards to all of these things, I make no money on any of it, so have at it what you will.