I want more news from Midlake’s third album that’s currently in the recording stage. Nay, I need more news of it. I want more of this glorious band and I cannot take the lack of new material.

Fortunately, the two albums and one EP we have are amazing enough to take away the pain.

Everyone by now knows their way in and out through The Trials of Van Occupanther – “Roscoe” and “Young Bride” were blog hits and raised the band to the top of the indie crowd attention charts. There isn’t much need to say more about that album anymore at this stage. Those however who continued further onwards, or backwards moreso, were most likely extremely surprised when they heard the 2004 Bamnan and Slivercork. I certainly was. The soft, organic sounds of Occupanther were gone, replaced with mechanical repetition, lo-fi synths, weary atmosphere and a particularly oddly electronic and mechanic atmosphere and drive that at the same time sounded confusingly organic.

He Tried to Escape

The synths that buzz and whirr and squeal all around turn the atmosphere into a pseudo-electronic layer storm. At the same time the lo-fi production of the instruments keep things homely and close to the listener, a warm and personal experience. But where guitars would normally roam, you just get more and more of the old fuzzy synthesizers and keyboards. Tim Smith sings absurd, oddball stories of oddball people in a voice that sounds like he’s half-asleep. The cheap-looking drawing of a monocled man in an unicycled apparatus against a bland yellow background on the album cover is unlike any other album cover.

The ending result is something that could just as well happen if some weird force turned a quiet rural village into a technology-filled automaton haven which then got abandoned and rusted away, and a group of ex-farmers now-factory workers who might as well be Radiohead members stopped operating on the ever-aging mechanical devices in the ruined factory and started playing music and singing songs about the things and people they’ve seen.

It’s an intriguing album due to its conflicting ingredients that somehow create something utterly memorable together, and unlike most albums that could be best defined as intriguing it actually manages to be marvellous in itself. Plus the drumming is excellent, there’s some many wonderful drum moments on the album.

The Radiohead influences slyly hinted above can be best seen on the band’s debut EP Milkmaid Grand Army which was re-released a while ago. It hints at Bamnan’s direction but keeps things a bit more organic, and the Radiohead fanboyism the band has admitted to shine the clearest – “Excited But Not Enough” sounding like a lost Rhead tune, for example. It’s actually a damn great EP and the opener “She Removes Her Spiral Hair” deserves a place in any self-made Midlake best of.

Such an amazing band overall. And dammit, I want a new album and I want it badly.

By the way, Fabchannel also has a Midlake gig on their servers, available to view for free when you click here. It’s heavily weighted on Van Occupanther, but seeing as that’s an amazing album as well there’s no need to panic.

Some of Them Were Superstitious

Tags: Midlake

This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.