Category: Tunes

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Best tunes of 2013: #27 Lanterns on the Lake “Elodie”

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Back in 2018, when I was counting down my favourite tunes of 2011, “Lungs quicken” from Lanterns on the Lake’s debut album, “Gracious tide, take me home” came in at number twenty-five on said list. I mused, then, at how perfect their name was, in terms of how it forewarned of what you would experience should you take the chance to listen to their music. “Lungs quicken”, and many of the tracks on their debut, evoked the image of “candles in paper lanterns, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, just visible in the mist out on the grey lake. And then the wind whips up, the music builds in volume and gusto, and the lanterns jostle on the waves, crashing and splashing but not going out.”

“Elodie”, the song of today’s focus, is also an opening track by the band but in this case, off their sophomore record, “Until the colours run”. And if the band were looking to forewarn of the change in sound, a portent of another coming sea storm perhaps, they succeeded here.

The indie pop band from Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, had lost a couple members, brothers Brendan and Adam Ian Sykes, since their first album. They replaced Brendan with Bob Allen on bass but the other brother would have been much more difficult to replace since he co-led on vocals on much of the debut, so instead the band chose not to. Hazel Wilde took sole responsibility for vocal duties moving forward and that seems like it gave the band more direction. Interestingly, there’s less electronic trickery* on “Until the colours run” and more focus on the stringed instruments and at the same time, Wilde’s vocals seem less fragile and more assured.

“Forget the barricades
We’re four years too late
And all your mother’s words
Strength’s not in numbers”

“Elodie” starts the album with a feedback warning and if you didn’t heed it, you’d run headlong into the brick wall of guitar noise that follows. Then, just when thought you’d need to come up for air, the guitars fade to echo, replaced with the high speed ticking of a clock, the tentative dabs on the piano keys, and Wilde’s plaintive tones. Of course, the guitars make a return and there’s this delicious push and pull between the angry noise and the delicate strings and inferred beauty. Whoever this Elodie was, she has invoked a lot of passion and for this, we can be thankful.

Happy Sunday!

*The “folktronica” is all but gone.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2013 list, click here.

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Best tunes of 2003: #19 The Clientele “Porcelain”

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London-based indie pop band The Clientele have appeared on these pages a few times already. A couple of their albums have appeared high up on the Best Albums lists for the years in which they were released (see here and here) and in their first appearance with “Rain” off their debut release in 2000, I talked a little bit about my introduction with the band. This came in 2003 with the release of their sophomore album and first proper studio album*, “The violet hour”.

I remember being in constant discussion with Jez, my friend and colleague at the time, about the bands we were discovering during our shared favourite post-work activity: trawling the Internet for new and exciting bands. I’m not sure which of us happened upon this particular album first but we were both enamoured with it right off the bat and I’m sure that our other colleagues must have tired of us raving about it. It almost became a running joke to bring them up at least once a conversation.

I’ve been following the group ever since, through the various lineup changes and hiatuses, and though each of their albums have been special, “The violet hour” is still my favourite. It is a collection of tracks that sounded like nothing else at the time and at the same time hinted at music from a bygone era. Track eight was this mellow but peppy number called “Porcelain”. It shared the feel and environment of the rest of the whole, like dewdrops glistening in the bright morning sunlight and gauzy curtains billowing in the warm summer wind. Like the echo of a half-remembered dream. MacLean whispers and croons his la-la-las and the guitars and drums and even that wicked bass line that pops its head in for munchies, they’re all sopping wet with reverb. And the words are not a narrative as much as they are an oil painting.

“Sunlight on the empty house and sunlight on the fields
The cul-de-sac, the law, the tracks, the lane
But the world is porcelain
Yes, the world is porcelain”

Incidentally, “The violet hour” is the only one of The Clientele’s albums that I still don’t have a copy of on my vinyl shelves but this is only because it hasn’t yet been reissued. I was beginning to think I’d never have a copy because I’d heard that the master recordings were lost but I am pretty sure that frontman Alasdair MacLean has since announced that they were found. So far there’s been no reissues announced but perhaps this year for it’s 20th anniversary? One can hope.

*Given that “Suburban light” was more of a compilation of early singles and b-sides, much like Lush’s “Gala” ten or so years earlier.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2003 list, click here.

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Eighties’ best 100 redux: #96 The Wonder Stuff “Unbearable” (1988)

credit to Derek Ridgers, Brighton 1988
credit to Derek Ridgers, Brighton 1988

<< #97    |    #95 >>

At song #96, we have The Wonder Stuff and their snarling, acerbic track “Unbearable”. This is a band that I typically identify with the early nineties because this is when I discovered them and also when the band released the bulk of their original catalogue. However, their startlingly upbeat debut album, “The eight legged groove machine” was released in the latter part of the eighties, back before the fiddle was added to the stuffies’ repertoire and before The Bass Thing left the band for America. I featured this very same album when it appeared at number two on my Best albums of 1988 list*, back when I counted that down a few years ago. And in that post, I described how the album was my introduction to the band and a bit of the story behind how the band became one of my favourites during my last few years of high school and into my early twenties.

For those unfamiliar with The Wonder Stuff, “Unbearable” is a good starting block. It is certainly representative of their early work and the rest of their debut album, seamlessly blending the pop mentality of The Beatles with the guns blazing, two-minute guitar rock of The Ramones. Yes, it’s the thirteenth track on a fourteen track LP that falls well short of the forty minute mark. Another song about money and the way it’s misspent, priorities and greed. It was this angst and snarling lyrics and vocals of frontman Miles Hunt that drew me (and by all accounts many others) to the band in the first place and what most probably led to the band’s downfall. They were quite popular for a time in their native country but sadly, The Wonder Stuff never quite broke into the North American market.

Original Eighties best 100 position: #98

Favourite lyric:  “I didn’t like you very much when I met you / And now I like you even less” Classic Miles Hunt.

Where are they now?: After their original break up in 1994, The Wonder Stuff re-formed for a string of shows in London in 2000. The shows were so successful, Hunt, who had been recording solo up to then, began recording new material under The Wonder Stuff name with the original guitarist, Malc Treece. The two of them are still at it these days, having added violinist Erica Nockalls in 2005, and the rest of the band has pretty much changed every few years since. They last surfaced with a new album called “Better being lucky” in 2019.

*In fact, each of their first three albums have appeared in the top five for albums on this blog for the years in which they were released.

For the rest of the Eighties’ best 100 redux list, click here.