Album Review: In The Limestone Country

There’s something about Bill Morris’ third album In the Limestone Country that feels like a large oil landscape painting: textured, layered, surreal. Or like a wide-angle shot opening across a rugged coastline, even a panoramic 1950s photo of mountain ranges where the joins don’t quite align but the vastness still takes your breath away.

This is historical folk at its most evocative. Hardship, struggle, survival – Morris draws out individual stories with plainspoken, direct language that makes them vivid and immediate. The voices here are haunting and strangely timeless – pioneers, sealers, convicts, speaking across the years. A line like “Emily, do you ever dream of England” catches the listener between the heart and the throat, carrying the ache of journeying across the world to “an island where no island should be”. These are the lives of toughness and endurance that shaped not only the land itself but the psyche of New Zealand.

Fittingly, the album was made in the back blocks of the Waitaki Valley at Steve Harrop’s Sublime Studio, over a period of five years. Produced by Harrop and engineered by Tom Havard, folk heavyweights Dave Khan and John Joe Kelly add their musicianship, completing the palette with guitar, fiddle, flute, bodhrán, and other instruments that feel carried across oceans. Hollie McPhee’s backing vocals round out the sound, creating the sense of an ensemble gathered around a fire — intimate, warm, and human.

The songs stand alone, but the strength of this music lies in the full picture the album paints. This Town, a spoken-word piece, feels like a threshold between the old world and the new. It speaks directly to the layers of history that still reside beneath the landscapes we walk today. Soundbites from early TV reels splice through the track, with a casual line like “A pie and a piss stop here will barely slow you down” mashing past and present together. It’s a beautiful collision of imagery and sound, folding lived experience into the album’s historical frame.

The title track In the Limestone Country closes the circle with a beautiful video tribute to the Waitaki region. Its refrain – “I’ll make my home there in the limestone country, between the chaos of the mountains and the arms of the sea” – roots the album in a place both intimate and immense, grounding the history in landscape and song.

It has been a decade since Morris’ last release Hinterland in 2015, and listeners of folk and history alike will feel it has been worth the wait. Hopefully, it won’t be as long before we hear from him again.