Great Spans Of Muddy Time (studio album) by William Doyle

The record starts off pretty interesting with two great songs right at the beginning but after that it seems to drop off a cliff and completely lose track of itself. It just becomes so repetitive and the music stylings are so bland that it is really hard to stay engaged in the record. On some songs the beats are actually quite annoying and they are trying to get stuck in your head but end up just being irritating. You can see the style they are going for on the first two tracks and if that quality was maintained the whole way through this record would be vastly superior to what it is. It doesn't do this however and is massively held back by the amount of filler that is on it. Overall, this isn't a very enjoyable album but you can see what they were going for but it just doesn't work for me.

From Mercury 03/23/2021 15:38

(Almost Another Green World-ish in its mix of soft and earnest pop tunes with ambient bits. A consistently beautiful and artful album that I quite liked.)

This is a beautiful album. It flies by, and there are no moments that turned me off or annoyed or bored me. The skeletal tracks generally work well when paired with the angelic vocals and the sweet melodies. The album flows relatively nicely, only when it go into a couple of the less interesting or inspired ambient instrumental tracks does it lose a little steam. But at its peak on songs such as "Semi-Biotic", the opener "I Need To Keep You In My Life" and "Nothing At All" the level of beautiful cohesion between the synths and the vocals and melodies and lyrics and all the interlocking details is truly amazing. On these songs I feel like its clear that William Doyle is an excellent artist.

As mentioned in the opening parenthetical snippet, this does remind me quite a bit of Another Green World by Eno. Of course whenever such an iconic and game-changing album is mentioned as similar I personally feel like that is hyperbolic and silly and more an indication of my relative lack of listening experience with this style of Ambient Pop. But the similarities are there, from the skeletal yet indelible melodies, the simple percussion sounds, the flow of the album from somewhat abstract but still hummable pop tune to a slow building ambient art pop tune to a short excursion down ambient land, the same general beats are hit here as on that 1975 classic. William Doyle has an excellent voice and he sings his songs excellently here, much like Eno there.

Overall, I quite liked this album, its artful, mildly abstract, serene, and adventurous. I went back and listened to his previous album Your Wilderness Revisited and I found a similar style there and I enjoyed it (on my one listen) just as much as this one. So I think I may have found another artist to keep my eye on going forward.