March 2, 2011

Album Review: Erland and The Carnival - Nightingale (Full Time Hobby)

Twisted tales surpassing the strangeness and quirk of their debut last year.

7 / 10 Only a year after their eerie, enchanting debut, Orcadian [from the Orkney Isles, southern heathens] Erland Cooper and his merry troupe (including former The Verve guitarist Simon Tong) are back with an even richer and stranger bag of tricks, this time recorded in the bowels of a boat in the Thames.

More magpies than nightingales across these 13 tracks, they stitch up a glorious grab-bag of modern psych; fans of The Superimposers, The Coral, Jim Noir or Gruff Rhys will find much to love down the footpaths forged between these points.

Magpie-like too, Cooper has a love of repurposing weighty lines to frame his quirky nests, as on “This night has opened my eyes” on ‘This Night’’s cathedral-rave-folk-meets-Franz skiffle or “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen” on ‘I’m Not Really Here’, or indeed ‘The Dream Of The Rood’, based around the Old English visionary poem of the same name. Not for the birds.

Emily Mackay

7/10

Order a copy of Erland and The Carnival's 'Nightingale' from Amazon