Music Banter

Here’s the first album I was really waiting for in 2010- Midlake’s ‘The Courage of Others.’

I fell in love with Midlake a year or two back when I heard ‘Roscoe’ on Mark Radcliffe’s show- it’s a wonderful piece of folk-rock, exhibiting both grace and charm, and an unexpected, meandering way with melody that kind of takes you by surprise and sweeps you off your feet. The album it came from, ‘The Trial of Van Occupanther’ was like that all the way through, and contained all sorts of wonderful lyrics about how good it would be to live in 1891, or to lose all you had and start again. There was a quiet, whispering pastoral spirit at work in the songs, and it spoke of a desire to retreat from the modern world of ‘hundreds of chemicals’ to the hilltops and the village, which ‘used to be all one really needs.’ It’s exactly the sort of thing I love, and it’s one of my favourite albums of the last few years.

The pre-publicity around this album was that they were referencing british folk-rock bands of the ’70s like Fairport Convention. Span and Pentangle, and I fucking love those bands. Give me a Cardigan, a violin reel and a lyric lifted from a fifteenth-century madrigal about elves and I am there, dude. I was kind of salivating about this one.

And on first listen, does it live up to my expectations? Well, kind of.

It’s sweet, sweeping, big, and is stretching out, trying to find that epic sense of space that the best albums have, and the influence of those referenced bands is certainly there. In ‘Winter Dies,’ for instance, there is a long instrumental section where you can hear the band stretch out, and they’ve clearly decided to show us what they can do as musicians.

The next song, ‘Small Mountain,’ calls forth images of Led Zeppelin’s more floral moments with its arpegiatted guitar and flute intro, and is charming and mellow. When the song kicks in, however, it doesn’t quite hold your impact. This pattern is repeated a lot throughout the album- a charming introduction gives way to a slightly underwhelming song. There are some exceptions- ‘Core of Nature’ is a highlight for me, so far, with it’s talk of a retreat into ‘woods which I walk through alone’ it harks back to the themes and musical ideas of previous album. It’s songs like this one which show that perhaps their next album will be a better version of this idea- if I’m being optimistic about this record, I would say that perhaps they are reaching for something which
they fell short of this time, but will maybe be able to reach next time.

There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic ‘Rulers, Ruling All Things’ is fantastic, just slightly missing the mark but still lovely in its glitter Tim Smith’s refrain of ‘I only want to be left to my own ways’ set above a huge, echoing cavern of flute music and twinkling sounds. It’s nice, but- you just wish the melody was a little stronger.

That’s the story of the album. Somehow, there isn’t quite the same immediacy in this collection of songs that ‘Van Occupanther’ had- the songs aren’t quite as strong (you feel that a lot of them started off as jams, rather than musical ideas the singer brought to the band) and just a little too often they tend to favour atmosphere over impact. It’s pleasant enough, but it feels just a little less focussed than the last record.

I can see this will be brilliant when summer rolls round- I’ll sit out under a tree with my mp3 player and listen to this with a book and perhaps a bottle of real ale, and I will glory in my folkishness. I’ll also have probably backed off my original high expectations and would write an entirely different review of this album. For now, though, I think I’ll view this as a qualified success, and something of a missed opportunity. For all my criticisms, it’s still my favourite new album of the year so far.

Full disclosure here- this band recently stayed at my flat, when they played a gig at my home town. Their singer, the wonderfully named Peter D’artagnan Liddle, is one of those people who is so obscenely talented you can’t quite understand that they’re a friend of yours. He’s also a top bloke, too.

But of course, you don’t care if him and I get along. You don’t want care if he’s a Nobel Prize winner who’s lovely to his gran.

It’s all about the music, and they’re bloody marvelous. When Dry the River perform, Pete is absolutely wonderful as a frontman- a wiry little twig of a man with the voice of a tired angel, who dances like he’s got some kind of twitching disease and leads his band through songs with remarkable passion, gyrating like a shaman caught in the throes of some kind of voodoo ritual. His songs have a simplicity and directness to them which are both immediate and lasting in their effect, with snatches of lyrics wedging into your subconscious to re-emerge at unbidden moments long after the music falls silent.

The songs themselves tend to favour the personal, and the pastoral- ‘Shaker Hymns’ describes an imagined marriage in a small community, where everyone in a person’s life is around all the time, and in that recalls the yearning for simplicity found in the work of, say, Midlake. ‘History Book,’ another standout, describes the fall-out at the end of a relationship with heartbreaking simplicity- the line ‘we’ll soon forget our parents names’ captures that sadness of separation, more perfectly than I’ve heard in a long time.

The band are exquisite- a stripped-back, delicate acoustic sound envelops and supports the singer’s voice with calm, controlled musicianship. The end result is, well, staggering.

But don’t just take my word for it. Listen for yourself.