With the conjuring of Until
the Colours Run, Lanterns on the Lake are now two albums old. As such, with two points upon the graphing
paper, it becomes at least possible, if not necessarily reliable, to connect
said dots in an attempt to discern a line of trend, or tendency.
And yet, although the dots number only two now, this is not
an easy or straightforward graphing project.
Lanterns on the Lake have crammed a semester’s worth of thought and
power into their two albums, and Until
the Colours Run reiterates that while both albums reward patient listening,
both of them also demand it.
The listening, thankfully, tends to be easy—there are very
few jarring, annoying, or indulgent moments to be found on this latest release,
and even the jarring moments serve agreeable ends like highlighting the rather
expansive soundstage. And yet for all
of the melody and beauty, this is certainly no exercise in pop music by any
reasonable interpretation of popularity odds.
Until the Colours Run is an
indie music version of an AP course:
subtle, challenging, and full of rewards for the diligent or the
obsessed.
“Elodie” ignites the proceedings with a volley of drum and
guitar, before all of the explosions recede behind the lonely singing of the
perfectly-named Hazel Wilde. The song’s effect
is immediately grand, bordering upon epic.
There are chattering drumsticks in the background, and more than one
wandering piano line. There are elegant
strings. By the time the lead guitar
assumes command at the three minute mark, this song with a title of a French
woman’s name sounds like the confused and chaotic center of a battlefield, and
the brief, solemn chorus sounds like a swoon, or a prayer:
Elodie, we’re not leaving now,
My body’s weak; arms are coming
down.
A couple of things here.
First, that is no common pair of lyric lines. Note the triple-pairing of vowel sounds and
the flirtation with a three-set of rhyme:
“Elodie/body;” “leaving/weak;” “now/down.” This would be fairly impressive if it
appeared in a published journal of creative writing; it is a rare gift indeed
to find it instead in the eerie spaces between notes of a rock song.
Secondly, “Elodie” does a masterful job of asserting two
album tendencies. The first is the
spellbinding combination of quiet and loud.
It is not uncommon for the
headphone-wearer to feel this album careening between ears, the brain and heart
bouncing through each spectacular dip and turn of the roller coaster ride. The second tendency is the band’s rather
unique ability to sound gorgeous and interesting without being particularly
catchy. This song is something of a tour
de force, and it will burn itself into your musical memory, but you won’t be
whistling it any time soon. Or ever.
And as if on cue to prove the latter point, second track
“The Buffalo Days” boots up with some diminutive acoustic guitar and violin
before crashing forth in a shattering and feedback-drenched rush of a million
drums and guitars. (There are times when
the thundering dynamics suggest a midland, terrestrial and temperate version of Sigur Rós.) The song
itself recounts a look back to humble beginnings from a frenetic
present—recollections of introductions, of conversations over wine. As with so many cleverly-framed songs about
beginnings, it isn’t entirely clear whether this is all about a dear love or
about a band, or both. “It is funny what
you don’t forget,” goes the line.
Indeed. Indeed.
Speaking of which, by title track 4, we have arrived at an
honest-to-greatness pop song. Guitars
ring out and a myriad of instruments fill the margins while deferring to the
concept of the earworm. We behold an
anthem, and the first lines do not shy from the moment: “The great crime of our time / could be
silence or closing eyes.” Arriving after
a couple of defiantly complex and earth-bound songs, “Until the Colours Run”
seems to soar. And while the results are
so very easy to listen to, it isn’t mindless pleasure. Reiterating the latter point is a rather
serious outro—wordless, quiet, and spanning a full two minutes of the
five-and-a-half minute track.
There is no let-up in the album’s middle. “Green & Gold” is a lovely and spare piano
ballad; “You Soon Learn” chimes with a delicate melody and pretty tremendous
backbeat; “Picture Show” is deconstructed down to street level so perfectly
that you can just about feel the raindrops—while recalling every bit the weird
yet comely image and sound of Tanya Donnelly.
Until the Colours Run’s
implied stature is altogether enormous, and yet there are songs that manage to
be bigger still. “Another Tale from
Another English Town,” is one of these—building elegantly from its charming
title and charming first notes into something approaching the blacked-out sky of
a Radiohead dystopia:
It’s getting hard to breathe round
here, to think round here,
And we’ve been sold a thousand lies
this year.
We just wanted a quiet life—a quiet
life,
But they won’t stop till they see
us in the ground.
Till they see us in the ground.
Till they see us in the ground.
The instrumentation and song structure are huge—something
that wouldn’t be out of place on a Coldplay record, actually. But embedded toward the close of this album,
“Another Tale” sounds many times more real, more tragic, more lost. It wasn’t so many years ago, after all, that
a rush and push and the land that we stand on was ours. No longer.
There are no songs to discard from Until the Colours Run, no wretched clunkers or feats of
indulgence. Perhaps more surprisingly,
there are no Grizzly Bear or Animal Collective-like experimental musical
mathematics exercises gone terminally awry.
For all of the ambition stuffed into this particular album, the vast
majority of said ambition is realized, and pleasantly so, without annoying
noodling.
The one quibble to arise is, therefore, a delicate one,
because it is the product of intention not of goof-up. This is the last great album on earth that
should ever be chosen for a car trip at speed, or as background music to
mundane task, or as the soundtrack to basically anything. It defies and frustrates unfocused listening;
it does not suffer the casual. It does not cast flattering light upon anything
but itself.
The great crime would be silence or closed eyes. And that about nails the album thesis to the
church door. There is no room, amid the
Lanterns on the Lake, for drifting or tuning out. The
album has altogether too many things going on for that, a rare excellence and
complexity that requires careful regard. Pencils down.
Keepers 1-9
December 2013
