More like folk music than indie rock, this album belongs to that oddball collection of English song makers that I associate with BRITISH SEA POWER and I LIKE TRAINS, perhaps going back to Andy Partridge and XTC. Dan Woolway and the band throw their hearts into grand themes of love, life and death with full-voiced vernacular harmonies and all the instruments and friends they could add to the basic indie guitar band. Like so much of the wonderful community music that is gradually replacing the anaemic national twaddle of mid-table indiedom in the hearts of regional music audiences, this is music made out of favours, unpaid labour and opportunities seized. Even if it didn’t sound so good, you would still want to support it by ordering a copy of your own.
The ten songs were recorded in Portsmouth, with Dave Allen producing and a motley collection of native instrumentalists passing themselves off as "The Richard P. Horne Youth Orchestra". The resulting sound is a convincing contemporary version of the kind of rough-hewn village bands that turned out for celebrations and feast days in the years before the Wars. Vocally, Dan Woolway has a very distinctive, seafaring sort of rasp, as might have been heard by the folk song collectors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries all along the South Coast. The Copper Family come to mind. The other voices, at their best, go for the shape note style of roughly improvised harmonies adopted by bands like Arcade Fire.
Maybe I’m overdoing the Cecil Sharpe credentials here. They are an English indie band for sure. But on the evidence of this fine album they are distinctive, different and hugely enjoyable. I think that if new listeners are coming from (but not confined by) the English folk tradition they are much more likely to identify the real value in this music, and sing along with gusto. Rhyming Jesus with "bottle smashed to pieces" as they do in "Autumn" makes for irresistible sing-along material.
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The big song (I challenge you not to join in) is “Rising Sea”, with bells and Woolway's voice is at its very best. The tune rolls like a gentle swell on a flowing tide and half of Portsmouth seem to be clearing their lungs and blowing their trumpets in support. You’ve probably heard it on the wireless already.
Drowning and death seem strange rallying cries. But this is in no way a morbid or mournful album. Tempos are brisk, even military, and the dominant emotional drift is heroic bravado in the face of unstoppable destiny. The Strange Death of Liberal England are singing, not pissing, into the gales that overwhelm us.
The band comprise Adam Woolway’s vocals and guitar, William Charlton’s guitars, Andrew Wright's Glockenspiel, keyboards and percussion, Kelly Jones’s bass and David Lindsay’s drums. They will be touring the UK throughout October and November.
www.tsdole.co.uk
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