Record Review - Tiny Ruins

TINY RUINS

Some Were Meant For Sea

Spunk

Some Were Meant For Sea is the debut long-player from New Zealand-based Tiny Ruins, otherwise known as Holly Fullbrook.  It’s a soft, non-assuming record, one with a dearth of hidden treasures which you, as the listener, need to search for.  Not in the sense that they’re buried amongst dross, but more that this is a grower of a record, offering first up a clutch of heartfelt songs, but then after more time, little bits and pieces you might have missed before but that now add to the overall effect.

Recorded with J Walker (Machine Translations) in an old school hall in eastern Victoria, Some Were Meant For Sea is as barebones as you can get.  And this adds to the feel of the record, for this isn’t something you’d play loud – it’s something you’d play when you want to listen, when you want to immerse yourself in an album and really get to the core of what the artist in question is trying to get across.  As such, the sparse sound and the simple instrumentation really allow Fullbrook’s songs to come to the fore, as I’m sure she would have hoped.

There’s a risk with this record first up in that it could immediately be put into the ‘wispy vocal, little girl pop/folk’ category, but again, this is a grower and the power in the record is that it quickly transcends that and flowers into what it really is – a simple yet meaningful record from an artist with a lot to say, and a solid idea of how to say it.

Samuel J. Fell

(published in Inpress Magazine (Melb), 13th July 2011)