There are times when browsing music sites that you wish the whole democratic, community-based, anyone-can-have-a-go, do-it-yourself shebang would go to the devil and cede music criticism back to the professionals. Such a thought came to me the other day when reading Pitchfork’s review of local folk-pop heroes Stornoway’s sophomore album; I think the thing that riled me most was the author’s tin-eared complaint that the band had no melodies. I think he went on to say that Brunel couldn’t draw, Watson and Crick’s DNA double helix rested on shaky intellectual grounds and Shane Warne didn’t spin the ball at cricket, but I couldn’t vouch for that because at that point the computer had been thrown out of the window.
That said, Tales From Terra Firma is not the perfect gem their debut Beachcomber’s Windowsill was. There are one or two genuine duds, some decidedly iffy lyrics and a sense of strain and awkwardness about a majority of the tracks which suggest that the band may be torn between their love of traditional song structure and their equally strong interest in experimentation (the latter is hardly surprising: at least two of them were once scientists by trade).
But before indulging in the gripes, it has to be said that the album opens and closes with two wonderful evocations of joy and loss, respectively. The uninhibitedly ecstatic ‘You Take Me As I Am’ is a wonderful wedding song, detailing the vows and celebrations in the most intimate and evocative manner. As you might expect from the pen of Brian Briggs, the scenes are full of the sights and sounds of nature: this is no self-conscious, groom-staring-at-his-knees registry-office-in-Coventry type affair. Rather it sounds like the goddess Gaia herself is the presiding deity, with the oceans and winds as witnesses. The music, graced by Rob Steadman’s lovely, light-touch drumming and a barrelling piano figure, is breezy and unforced; the unobtrusive saw is a welcome echo of earlier Stornoway.
Closer ‘November Song’ is another near-perfect track. Written for solo guitar and voice, Briggs shows how he can craft an apparently artless melody, or rather how he can discover one, as you wonder how on earth no-one thought of it before. The lyrics, pining for an unobtainably prosaic childhood, are sincere and genuinely moving.
There are plenty of glories elsewhere on the record. ‘Farewell Appalachia’ is a gorgeously widescreen love song, though the landscape is as sombre and forbidding as a scene from No Country For Old Men. The vocals, always a strong suit for this band, are immensely impressive. ‘The Ones We Hurt tThe Most’, an unobtrusive pearl lodged near the end, gives us stacked vocals which come close to the expansive harmonies of Grizzly Bear or Fleet Foxes, while possessing an unmistakeably British stoicism.
However, nearly half the numbers on this rather slim record have significant flaws. Of these, ‘The Bigger Picture’ is the first Stornoway song I actively dislike. The music is pretty but harmless, there’s a noodling mandolin solo halfway through and the lyrics are formulaic, banal and annoying. The choruses in particular read like a list of Brian’s favourite tourist spots and the whole comes across as condescending and big-headed, the subtext being: “hi there, oiks, I’ve been on the highest hillsides, I’ve sailed the widest oceans and brought back red-eyed tree frogs from the deepest rainforest while your idea of a good time is to sit and watch The Cube on a Saturday evening in Didcot in between scratching your balls for variation”. Nearly as bad is ‘The Great Procrastinator’ which rivals Paul McCartney’s granny music sub-library (‘When I’m Sixty Four’, ‘Your Mother Should Know’, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’) for codgerish complacency. And I have no idea what the uncharacteristically tuneless ‘Hook, Line, Sinker’ is doing on a Stornoway record.
Other tracks such as ‘(A Belated) Invite To Eternity’ contain strong sections (I love the windswept, rain-soaked verses) but are interrupted by clumsy time changes and unnecessary angularity; another example is single ‘Knock Me On The head’ which figures a verse melody as beautiful as anything they have written, but the chorus disappoints, with its repeated “No, no, no, no”s.
A divisive record, then. The critics have been divided (The Guardian gives it a rave, but they’re wrong about everything, of course), I’m divided and I think the band might be too, with the perfect folk of ‘November Song’ jostling the space-rock shenanigans of ‘Hook Line, Sinker’ for space and attention. I hope they get in the studio again soon (2010 to 2013 is an awful long time, chaps) and give us something more unified, as otherwise we’ll be left to the horrible devices of Mumford and Sons. No, no, no, no.