While his day job in Divorce often feels like a high-velocity road trip, Felix Mackenzie-Barrow’s solo debut, Book of Churches, is the sound of pulling over at 3:00 a.m. to watch the engine cool. It’s a skeletal collection, closer to a late-night demo session than a polished studio production. Written and tracked in a frantic, 48-hour blur using nothing but a couple of microphones and a cell phone’s worth of scars, the album carries the “first thought, best thought” urgency of a fever dream you’re desperate to write down before it evaporates.
The record feels like a well-worn coat, frayed at the seams but still oddly protective. Opening with “Song By a Stranger,” Mackenzie-Barrow establishes a kind of “retrospective sadness,” where the lyrics come through like light leaking under a door. The sonic palette is rough-hewn and unearthed rather than built, like something dug up from under years of noise. By stripping away the armoured layers of a full band, he lets tracks like “All the Good Things” and “There You Go I Love You” breathe with the dusty, private gravity of a Leonard Cohen poem left in a bedside drawer. These songs read as quiet admissions about the empty chairs we eventually have to learn to sit in.
The album’s middle act moves like weather across a coastline. “North Atlantic Ocean” catches that specific, suspended drift of an airport terminal, with subtle triangle chimes echoing thoughts as they slip their moorings. “The Quiet Was a Heron” shows how a whisper can land harder than a scream; it indicts human apathy with the fragile, cutting edge of a bird’s wing. Even when the electricity finally flickers on in “I Lean,” or the distorted vocal collages of “Big Love” disturb the hush, the intimacy holds. It feels like a musician inviting you into an untreated room of the mind, where the flaws aren’t polished away but left as part of the structure.
By the time the harmonica of “Stones in Your Bag” sighs across the finish line, the record leaves you with a long, low exhale. It’s a work of generous friction, where the weight of grief presses up against the lift of new beginnings. Mackenzie-Barrow hasn’t just made a solo record; he’s carved out a small sanctuary from thin air and stubborn honesty, an album best inhaled when the rest of the world finally goes quiet.
