Elba Sessions

Well, what a bloody lovely album this is.

If I were old fashioned and still used a typewriter, there is every chance I’d have an waste-paper basket by my side overflowing with attempts to review this album. It’s not that it’s a complicated album, or that I couldn’t get my head around it’s sound. It’s simply because I wanted to do it justice. I’ll more than likely turn into some bumbling idiot yelling the odd brilliant, superb or magnificent in there for good measure, but for now, I’ll try my best to stay coherent.

‘Payday’ opens the album with a drone and echo sound which sounds somehow like a call to sit up and listen to what’s coming next. ‘Crank Resolutions’ is a mesmerisingly beautiful song with frantic synths and loops. There’s something mad but at the same time very settling about it. It’s a song I’ve repeatedly listened to over the last month and the effect is always the same, a knowing smile that this is one of the reasons why I love music.

The albums keeps pace with the industrial soundscape and title track ‘All Creatures Will Make Merry’ and then almost effortlessly shifts pace to the acoustic ‘Weather’ followed by the stripped back, ukelele, song from a long time ago sounding ‘One Day This’ll All Be Fields’.

I could go on, describing each track individually and how it switches from fast to slow, frenetic to soothing, loud to soft, but it might make it sound like a jumbled up and incoherent album which is what it is not. It’s effortless and graceful, it takes you other places and makes you excited about where it will go next.

And whilst many ‘last tracks’ can be utterly forgettable or skippable because the six minute gap for the hidden track is just not built for the i-pod generation, ‘A Fair Exchange’ a beautiful 72 second piano driven song, with strings which is a reflective and comforting way to end one of the best albums I’ve heard all year.

The album is released on the brilliant Song, By Toad Records on May 24th but special limited handmade copies are available, subject to availability, here and at Meursault shows. Talking of Meursault shows, this poster was too good not to stick on the blog. Even better that it looks like an amazing line up!