Last Harbour “Volo” (Little Red Rabbit, 2010)

A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

We British aren’t usually very good at the doomed beauty scenario; the dark heart that beats under Last Harbour’s long overcoat has few companions on these shores. Just the Tindersticks reach the same heights (or depths) of beauty found in despair. Other fellow travellers are the Willard Grant Conspiracy and the Walkabouts, Americans who are happy to integrate a more European sensibility into their work. Though Last Harbour are based in Manchester, which is no stranger to miserableism, they aspire to several planes above run of the mill misery, they bleed existential angst, economics and the weather don’t move them, emotions, sensibilities are what drive them.

What also drives them on this record is a change of approach. They slowly built the songs and then handed them over to Richard Formby to mix, and left him to it. Ceding this kind of control hasn’t harmed them in the least, there’s still a grand eloquence to the songs ‘If They’re Right’ swirls and howls like dark thoughts in an insomniac brain, a maelstrom of strings and words being pulled towards a single dark point, the music abandoning itself to noise as helplessness asserts its grip, the record ends with white noise and about as much comfort as ‘The Road’.

Immersing yourself in these songs means that you give yourself to the sucking danger of the twisting undertow; your feet soon go as the songs drag you into a cauldron of boiling dark angst, constantly stirred by agitating strings and swelling from the rhythmic oar slap of the percussion. Once you fetch up on some godforsaken shore flighty vultures will pick your bones clean, ‘Sunken Bells’ is a sea of musical doom. The surface of ‘The Blood is a Compass’ may have a neon organ and Scott Walker leaning up against the only lamp post lit on a street, it is soon launched into inky umbra, a cloak of strings envelopes the rich tone of the vocal.

Dense and brooding are the default words to describe this music and even when there is the hint of a more pastoral feel, as on the rippling acoustic guitar of ‘Don’t Fall’, I find myself holding my breath waiting for the stab of darkness, here though a harmonica calls out, setting off thoughts that this is just a respite in a bitter trench war.

It is all too easy for this kind of music to be carried into self-parody, weighed down by its portent and earnestness, it leaves little space as it hurtles towards a series of tiny apocalypses. It is something that they manage to mostly avoid as there are sufficient differences of texture between the songs. The short passages of French radio announcements(?) that punctuate and divide the record into quarters are like miniature shipping forecasts that tell us that the next song will be stormy with high winds and some chance of danger.

Date review added:  Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Reviewer:  David Cowling
Reviewers Rating:
Related web link:  The harbour for dark thoughts