 Regular readers of this blog – should such creatures exist – will remember that I stumbled across Lonely Tourist as a support act at a recent Bristol show. Despite his assurance that we could get the album free online, I paid real cash to the man himself for a CD that night. It was as much a show of allegiance as a purchase – accosting the poor chap seconds after he left the stage and gruffly demanding one of his CDs. He was of course more than happy to oblige me, and perhaps more encouragingly the steady stream of people which followed.
And it’s perhaps fitting I purchased this record on the sticky floor of The Cooler rather than slumped in front of the computer here in relative comfort, as much of this record focuses on the trials and tribulations of a gigging musician trying to quietly carve a niche in a bloated market. From the outset, Lonely Tourist squarely marks his lyrical territory on “Patron Saint Procrastinate” – a stirring, uplifting melody which carries a defeated but defiant vocal detailing just how little he’s done that day, but how much is planned for tomorrow. We’ve all been there – and this very blog is nothing if not testament to the very same patron saint. As swells of organ join mid-song, Lonely Tourist‘s half-spoken vocals soar and the song becomes an anthem in celebration of procrastination. It’s hard not to sing along, proud of our own non-achievements.
This is follwed swiftly by “Watch For The Sharks”, which leans more towards the live Lonely Tourist sound – a deftly strummed guitar weaving around a lyric which describes the on-the-road experiences of a musician trying to make it against the odds. This recurring theme doesn’t get tired because we’re all secretly voyeuristic about what happens when the musician leaves the stage – perhaps exactly why the whole ‘X Factor’ phenomenon is so inexplicably popular. Lonely Tourist‘s take on musicianship is wry, amusing and perhaps a little downtrodden, reminding me somewhat of James Yorkston‘s reflections in his recent book “It’s Lovely To Be Here”. The realisation captured in the refrain “I’m up in four hours time…” familiar to anyone who has ever tried to combine a day job with a musical career.
Title track “Sir, I Am A Good Man” takes a new turn though, a cowboy lament which is more wild west than than West Country – a keening steel guitar creating a dark mood as Lonely Tourist relates episodes from the life of “…a man things just happen to“. Its an expansive, moody piece which shows a breadth of songwriting craft by taking things away from the dark, damp club and out into the dry unforgiving desert. It’s not long before we’re back on more familiar territory however, with the regret-tinged “Beatclub Chancer” where a stray glockenspiel tempers the forlorn lyrics. This track forms a relatively upbeat companion piece to the following “Too Old For Clubbing”, ushered in by a sweep of feedback which echoes away behind a delicately picked guitar and some of Lonely Tourist‘s most understated and sensitively delivered vocals on the record. Later, “Delighted” returns to Lonely Tourist‘s preoccupation with the business of making music, and uses a sprightly melody to ably articulate the difficulty in dealing with others’ success – summing up with the observation that “bitterness gets you nowhere/that’s where it got me“. It’s a tale familiar to anyone who has supped quietly at the bar after the soundcheck and before the support band, and perhaps it’s a little self-concious – but there is a heavy and for some I suspect indigestible dose of reality here.
It would be wrong to dismiss Lonely Tourist as a one-trick pony, writing introspectively about the musician’s art – but it’s unsurprisingly a preoccupation at this point in a career which can only progress. This record is clever, funny and eminently listenable. It reflects highs and lows – and some of the lows are fairly gloomy, but the sense of humour which Lonely Tourist injects into even his most grim self-deprecation lifts things – you’re always with him, never against him. I urge you to buy this music, and seek out a gig when he’s in your town. To have a talent like this practically on my doorstep is something of a revelation.
“Sir, I Am A Good Man” can be downloaded from Lonely Tourist’s Bandcamp. You don’t have to pay, but you certainly should.
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 I was in a desperate hurry, and didn’t really have time to stop – but I couldn’t resist swiftly transferring the newly arrived CD to my iPod before heading out. I’ll confess a brief wince regarding King Creosote‘s professed dislike of “stolen, compressed tunes” but I’d been waiting for this for a long time – and I couldn’t chance not taking the first opportunity to hear it. So, it’s out into the warm and misty spring evening with a vague hint of wood smoke – but despite the tinkle of tea cups and cafe chatter I can hear, I’m a long way from the East Neuk haven immortalised in “First Watch”, tramping through a post-industrial Somerset backwater in terminal decay. The smoke is probably the hotel burning down again. That this record has the ability to transport the listener is simply beyond doubt.
What is immediately striking about “Diamond Mine” is the sympathy and space which Jon Hopkins affords these songs. His touch is deft, considered and builds gently – assembling sounds off-camera which sweep through the compositions, sometimes leaving little more than an echo. The tracks don’t so much end, as melt into each other – with a continuous summery haze of warm noise, or the crack of twigs underfoot. As much a journey as a record, Hopkins works to enhance the simple instrumentation rather than complicate things, using occasional dashes of harmonium or banjo – nothing which would be out of place on any King Creosote record perhaps, but arranged to create a particular mood – a sense maybe of rural East Fife which betrays this records origins, and it’s slow, seven year progress towards release.
It’s a strange shock to hear a Bits of Strange song appearing brazenly in public, in the form of a wistful take on “Bats In The Attic” – still an uneasy catalogue of the signs of aging, but here sounding resigned and full of quiet regret rather than defiant. It cements the notion though, that those elusive songs are equally deserving of a wider audience and deserve a life on record – though perhaps to capture them would be to halt their evolution? In any case, this version is beautifully done with a sparse piano marking the melody while a distant crackle of static weaves in and out, King Creosote duetting with Lisa Lindley-Jones as gentle percussion punctuates the mix. Soon, “Bubble” arrives with an appropriate analogue popping and crackling, as King Creosote‘s forlorn falsetto spins a beautiful and gentle lament over the sparse electronics and muted piano. The lyrics are personal, often bittersweet, and always deeply affecting – King Creosote at his finest. Once again Lisa Lindley-Jones‘ vocals add a fine counterpoint, keeping the song from descending too deeply into melancholy as Hopkins wash of electronica ebbs and flows like the tide – the sounds of the Firth of Forth never seeming far from these pieces.
Things take an almost orchestral turn on “Your Own Spell”, setting out with a spacious, piano backing before being joined by a shimmer of unashamedly Caledonian fiddle which eventually builds against a backdrop of apparently blustering winds, before twisting around its own echoes and forming a crescendo of strings – the pained implications in the line “arriving late in church/your dress is soaked” illustrating a classic King Creosote trick by elevating the tiniest of everyday observations to a pivotal event. The sense of a snatched photograph or hastily scribbled postcard, rather than an over-executed set-piece portrait. The record closes, far too soon, with “Your Young Voice” – a simple repeated, heartbreaking refrain of “It’s your young voice that’s keeping me holding on/to my dull life…“. King Creosote‘s voice soaring above a gently plucked guitar, before the piano takes the song to it’s quiet, near-broken ending amidst the crackle of burning logs or maybe the creaking of a boat – or perhaps with sinister implications, both?
Retracing my steps later, the night is still warm and smoky and I’m still listening to “Diamond Mine” – wondering at its understated, genuine beauty – and pondering how on earth I’m going to write anything sensible about it while avoiding hyperbole? This music is calm on the surface, with strong emotional undercurrents. It’s also apparently capable of travel in both time and space. And with the laws of physics left as broken as my vow not to wax excessively lyrical, I commend “Diamond Mine” to you. You won’t regret it.
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 I sometimes wonder why any of us, bloggers or journalists alike, feel we have the right to expound on music. After all, it’s art isn’t it? There’s no right or wrong way to go about this stuff. But then there is something about being the consumer here, and of demanding a level of quality which suits. Of course if it were that simple, we’d be writing dispassionate pieces for Which? magazine, stressing that this disc is reasonably good value because it clocks in at 41 minutes. FOUND have intrigued me for a while now, because of the explicit and unashamed artistry explored in their work. Indeed, it’s impossible to read about them now without the baggage of Scottish Arts Council funding and their various, wonderfully outlandish projects being unearthed. But what is exciting about “Factorycraft” is how it bypasses all of this mythology, all of the confusing detail which made me wonder if FOUND were a band I could relate to? It’s just a ridiculously good record. I could probably end this here, but – because we never do err on the side of brevity in the blog world – I won’t of course.
So, for the uninitiated FOUND are three gentlemen from Edinburgh who got together at art school. Via a couple of confusing but brilliant albums, an ongoing dalliance with Fence which like all that label’s dealings is never quite over, and the ambitious effort of releasing a ton of free stuff over the last year, they come to “Factorycraft”. The title is no accident, and from the beautifully designed sleeve to the lyrics of recent single “Machine Age Dancing” the hum of industry and the absurd depersonalisation of automation and mass-production is never far from the foreground. Proceedings open with an old favourite in “Anti-Climb Paint”, but it’s been refreshed and reworked with slashing guitars and a choppier rhythm. However its howl of sexual frustration remains intact and as potent as ever. It’s followed by the curiously titled “I’ll Wake With A Seismic Head No More” which bleeps and shudders into life, before performing the musical equivalent of a tightly executed three-point turn into an anthemic rock chorus. Rarely do FOUND‘s songs remain in any niche or genre for long. The structures are complex – with a curious but insistent internal logic which is perhaps the biggest development since their earlier efforts.
“Blackette” slinks in behind a cartoon bassline, a deft touch of electronic rhythm preceding a simple, sing-along love song to particle physics – and somewhere around this point I realise that this is consistently brilliant stuff. Every song a polished gem of FOUND-style oddness, with a clever lyric and an unexpected turn towards the anthemic, before a shuddering time-shift into another genre entirely . On the previous FOUND records, there were plenty of strong songs of course, but their tendency to collapse in on themselves or to disappear far too soon into a fog of white-noise or bleeping was ever present. With this renewed focus, my personal album highlight arrives in “Lowlandness”. It’s a fantastic title for starters, but this disconcertingly wobbly ballad drenched in big guitars and burbling electronics resolves into a proper pop song in time for the frankly superb chorus. The lyrics displaying a touch of wry humour into the bargain. On “Every Hour That Passes” this reaches an Arab Strap-eque level of embittered introspection with “its a safe prediction you’re sick of me, because I make you sick predictably“. Another trademark FOUND focus shift, and the band are chanting “we’re just not getting on” like a woozy punk chorus line. The wordplay and dark humour behind the lyrics is a constant delight too on “Factorycraft”.
The album ends with “Blendbetter” – a bridge between the past and the future for FOUND, swooping in with a dizzy jangle and a menacing electronic drone. It stutters and bleeps into being with a dark undercurrent, as a tale of everyday romantic ineptitude spins out into a drawn out wash of note-bending noise. And then it explodes…fuzzily and messily with a cry of “…now nothing can hold me back“. As frustrated and unresolved as it is triumphant, the track fades as it entered. Breathtakingly good, and hopelessly addictive.
Pigeonholing music is a curious thing. We all know it’s wrong and lazy, but we all do it. Even the most eloquent of bloggers can’t avoid the occasional genre tagging incident, and it’s an easy way of marketing music – just look at how many bands describe themselves in terms of others for instance. So what happens when a band like FOUND defy easy categorisation by switching their reference points sometimes two or three times per song? One approach is to pin down one aspect of the band and amplify it – thus my advance knowledge of their art-school pedigree and their multimedia antics. Another is to invent a genre just for them, and so we have the curious but pretty odd concept of “glitch pop”. However, I’m going to attempt to take the third path here and try to let the songs speak for themselves. It feels unseemly to be bandying abount end-of-the-year superlatives just yet. However, at first spin it becomes evident that there is something very special at work here.
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 It must be difficult following a frankly stunning debut. I recall back in the 1990s when I still pored over the music press in the hope of hearing about new things, there was a running joke in the NME about the ‘difficult second album’. It’s hard to know whether it was meant to be difficult for the artist or the listener? Perhaps though it’s both – with expectations raised by a sterling debut, bearing down weightily on artists who now have a reputation and a recognised niche to occupy. The best bands seem to shatter the box on the way out, taking our preconceptions with them. Others choose to make their chosen bit of the musical world their own little palace. Both routes are fine – but it’s pretty hard to live in both worlds at the same time.
But You Already Know seem to be doing just that on this new album, a follow up to 2009′s “Stop Whispering”. That debut was uncommonly fine – a mixture of light and dark, punishing solid riffs alongside moments of near-epic grandeur. It was, for a little while in the post Christmas lull of early 2010, pretty much all I would listen to. Instrumental music has it’s place – and anyone who tells you it’s dull or boring is clearly more interested in the cult of personality around the singer than the song itself. However, there are some bits of this record – particularly early on – which are just a little dull and almost a bit YAK-by-numbers. The album starts with a clear statement of what to expect with the solid, thunderous “Let’s Fuck”. It thuds relentlessly along with a dangerously non-ironic ‘metal’ solo squealing away in the background. When this surfaced as a single back in late 2010 it was a fun cobweb-destroying romp, but in the context of an album with a fair bit of this kind of material up front, it’s a little less convincing.
Happily, by the time we reach “Amber Lamps”, YAK are back on form, and the album improves exponentially from here in. The bludgeoning, hard-edged rhythm section remains but is tempered by a more melodic, soaring element which takes these songs beyond the grime and grunt of the early part of the album and into a more interesting dimension. YAK seem to have settled on a sort of metallic take on post-rock which is eminently listenable and emotionally engaging – which is never easy for entirely instrumental music like this. The latter part of this record manages this by having an undercurrent of soaring melodies which temper the storm which the band are capable of creating.
“The Gush” represents a return to the thrash and burn of the first part of the record, but is followed by the initially menacing but ultimately gorgeous “Meatshield”. Here YAK slow the pace and quell the urge to rush for the end of the song long enough to produce a contemplative, almost gentle post rock hymn which explodes with satisfying fury – and keeps exploding until it reaches a swooning anthemic conclusion. This inventive and more restrained technique is maintained through “Into and Over You” which stacks up around a martial drumbeat, building towards a searing ending. The album returns to it’s roots for the closing “Business Class” which combines a filthy, funk-metal bassline with a roar of guitars. It’s difficult not to love this closing riot of noise, just because it breaks all the rules and demonstrates the playful ambivalence to genre and stereotype which YAK have developed.
Despite my whines and gripes about the early part of this record I find myself coming back to this collection of songs in different ways – the first few songs perfect after frustrating days in the office, and the latter part of the album for brilliant cold morning commutes. I’m wondering perhaps if it’s all in the sequencing of the tracks? This is something which is hard to get right – and in the post-CD age where people have the freedom to rearrange things easily, it’s sometimes perhaps not given the attention it needs. In any case, this is a noisy beast of a record with a sense of humour alongside it’s epic and serious moments.
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I received an email a few days back suggesting that I was neglecting my local music scene in favour of events much further away. It wasn’t that polite, but you get the picture. I replied as I have before, that when things locally began to move away from the years of dull pub rock and tribute bands which seem to stifle any kind of genuine creative spirit I’d happily cover them. I also suggested that when promoters here realised that local support for national touring bands was a means of exposing talent to new audiences, that too would be a positive thing. So at first, tonight looked like a ‘told you so’ moment – yes Admiral Fallow have trodden the southbound path from Glasgow – but we had local support acts didn’t we?
Well, kind of…. Lonely Tourist is an expat-Glaswegian now based in Bristol. He takes the stage cutting a rather slight and nervous figure in a check shirt, and with a near apologetic introduction. It’s just him and an acoustic guitar slung high on his chest, and the audience don’t seem greatly interested in the bar at the back of the room – welcome to Bristol. Then however, he starts to play – the rapid, cowboy-style strum of the busker. His voices soars above the chatter and things get interesting. A gradual drift begins, and by the end of his closing number there are plenty of people watching and listening. Whatever this is, it’s probably not folk music of either the new or old variety. Lonely Tourist offers a sort of edgy, acoustic pop with wonderfully self-deprecating lyrics which dodge bitterness in favour of humour. His patter – which he assures us he “left at home” – is muted, restricted to plugging his newly released CD. Recent single “Patron Saint Procrastinate” – on record a sparkling almost country-pop gem – is delivered as a sparse high-speed strum, with Lonely Tourist‘s voice by far the most important instrument – clear and melodious when he sings, gruff and impenetrable when he speaks between songs. I caught the lyrics of “Delighted” – a tale of skirting the edge of the music industry and watching people become successful – and thought back to my email. I suppose Lonely Tourist is technically local now? I don’t think he’ll be on the edge of things for long with songs this strong. One to watch for sure, and his debut album can be obtained from Bandcamp.
Port Erin however, were an odd choice to throw into tonight’s mix. A three-piece from Wiltshire, who listen to a lot of classic rock music I’m sure. Technically, all three of them showed enormous skill as musicians – with a special word for the sinuous and fluid bass. However, I’m not sure what it added up to? The songs, often perhaps a little over-long, moved from crashing, angry grunge-fests to oddly unnerving Dire Straits play reggae numbers. It was all just confusing, and sandwiched between tonight’s other acts it just felt strangely out of place. Like all support bands, they’d brought along their cheerleaders who lounged laconically around the venue during the other bands, but leapt up to support their heroes. It’s probably a good thing they did, because I fear quite a few of the rest of the audience just didn’t get Port Erin. I stress that this band isn’t bad – far from it, they are technically proficient, the vocalist has an engaging falsetto and the drummer is a tiny ball of thunderous energy. But it felt like they’d just discovered Dad’s record collection. In another situation, perhaps things would have been different?
At last I get to see Admiral Fallow! Having been elsewhere – annoyingly north of the border I think – for both their previous Bristol shows, I felt like I had some catching up to do tonight. Having been an early adopter of their frankly amazing “Boots Met My Face” album last year, it was fantastic to see it being released more widely – even if this tour to support it had been somewhat dwarfed in significance by their invitation to SXSW. In fact, tonight’s performance was the last date before the band jetted off to Texas to join a host of other Scottish musicians. Taking the stage to music which sounded suspiciously like incidental music from Highlander the band opened with the gentle “Delivered”. This was the first time the entire band, including the drummer had played in Bristol – and the sound was full and rich – credit indeed to their soundman who had coaxed a surprising depth out of the sometimes rather acoustically dull box of The Cooler. With the audience spellbound, there was no pause at all as the band errupted into “These Barren Years”. There was dancing. Not me of course – never. But, in a move seen rarely with cool, Bristolian audiences, there was visible movement at the front of the venue! The set was formed from much of the triumphant album, but a couple of new compositions featured too – they were notable for feeling a little tougher and angrier, with the lyrics interestingly moving from the reminiscence and introspection of “Boots Met My Face” to a wider view of the world. Notably Louis Abbott and Sarah Hayes seemed to take a somewhat more balanced share of the vocals. A set highlight though was “Four Bulbs” – here, the instruments were laid down and the microphones switched off. The band formed a choir around Louis and his acoustic guitar and delivered the song note-perfect, it’s aching beauty intact even here in a slightly grimy Bristol nightclub. The audience responded rapturously inspiring a storming, triumphant “Squealing Pigs” before the band left the stage. The encore consisted of a solo Louis covering Elbow‘s “Switching Off” – the influence clear in this gentle, affecting delivery – before a final and life-affirming romp through “Old Balloons”, the song which probably persuaded me here in the first place.
Encouragingly, the Bristol audience already knew Admiral Fallow were destined for big things – the support slot with Frightened Rabbit likely having confirmed this was something special. They left the stage, almost directly heading to the USA with the genuine warmth of the often tricky Bristol audience ringing in their ears. It had been a special night for a couple of very special bands. And it was sort of local, I suppose…
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Regular readers of this blog – should such creatures exist – will remember that I stumbled across Lonely Tourist as a support act at a recent Bristol show. Despite his assurance that we could get the album free online, I paid real cash to the man himself for a CD that night. It was as much a show of allegiance as a purchase – accosting the poor chap seconds after he left the stage and gruffly demanding one of his CDs. He was of course more than happy to oblige me, and perhaps more encouragingly the steady stream of people which followed. 
