Always, the guilt comes. Nibbling the conscience, a small internal voice insidiously queries our sense of proportion: are the local acts we love fully deserving of praise, or is our shelf lined with rose tinted CD cases? In short, do we hope for greatness so hard, we begin to imagine it?
Well, we’ve listened to this new Stornoway LP repeatedly, and although we want them to succeed because they’re local heroes and delightful boys to boot, the fact is that this record is astonishing, doubtlessly the most exciting collection of cerebral English joy-pop since The Divine Comedy’s Promenade. Take that, paranoid interior monologue! Most of the songs will be familiar to locals, but the recordings are perfect, beautifully constructed, yet never overegged, making Stornoway superior to Mumford & Sons, the act with whom they’re most often compared. Like some of the best pop, Beachcomber’s Windowsill is epic and intimate simultaneously.
And with that the review can only become a list of favourite moments. The melancholic life story of ‘Fuel Up’; the lush porch song ambience of ‘We Are The Battery Human’, like Charlie Poole rewritten by The Daintees; the opening of ‘On The Rocks’, in which Simon & Garfunkel get lost in a strawberry mist before being lifted away on God’s own cymbals; ‘Long-Distance Lullaby’’s ultra-clean horn section that make us think of Tanita Tikaram for no reason we can fathom.
This is a world class collection of songs deliciously presented. Of course there are tiny imperfections. Despite the high esteem in which it’s held, we’ve never really been excited by ‘The End Of The Movie’, at least until the wistful conclusion. Also, the lyrics to ‘The Coldharbour Road’ are somewhat clunky – you can’t really defend the schoolboy clumsiness of “I am a seabird, you are the Arctic Ocean”? Oh, and we’re not convinced you can really have an exclamation mark after an ellipsis, which counts against ‘Here Comes The Blackout…!’. Can you tell we’re grasping at straws here? We bloody love this record, and to balance these minor peccadilloes we have wonderfully subtle touches in the arrangements, especially the mournful pier end organ in ‘Fuel Up’ or ‘Zorbing’s Red Army Choir backing vocals.
The tagline on Stornoway’s Myspace has been “A living, breathing Mark Twain novel” for quite some time, but we don’t hear the blustery, satirical, knockabout carnival of Samuel Clemens on this album; we prefer to think of the band as a hushed yet hopeful British poem, the introspective halfsmile of Edward Thomas’ ‘Adlestrop’. The record ends with a tale of waking up someone just for a tipsily emotional phone call, and the chance to say “Goodnight, soulmate”. Companionship, honesty, pop music: Stornoway certainly know what the best things in life are.