- Label: 'Abandoned Love Records'
- Genre: 'Folk'
- Release Date: '12th May 2015'- Catalogue No: 'ALR21'
Our Rating:
There's something quietly subversive about the "palatial pop" from this five piece who call both Edinburgh and London their home.
The opening song takes its title from the band’s name and is a gentle call to arms: "Storm the palace, trash the room, destroy the chandelier".
This is parlour music, albeit with a radicalised subtext. It conjures up a pleasing image of the group members - two women and three men - politely asking permission before reaping destruction on various symbols of oppression.
Harpsichord, glockenspiel, harmonium and other string instruments are evidence of the band's deceptively sedate baroque tastes but the "historical sweep" of their influences are listed as taking in Fado, Flamenco and established literate artists such as Kate Bush, Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker.
I also hear some similarities with The Delgados, since Sophie Dodds’ voice has a similar precision to Emma Pollock's. Yet, despite the clarity of Dodds' singing, the impressionistic lyrics leave the songs wide open to interpretation. This ambiguity is no bad thing, of course, and any band who thinks nothing of using a word like ‘balustrade’ in a pop song is all right by me.
The video to Statues And Snowmen uses images from a 1962 propaganda film American Thrift (An Expansive Tribute To the Woman American). This suggests that the song could be written from the perspective of a lonely woman with unrealised dreams: "I have no plan, I have no programme, just crazy visions and no-one I can show them to". But making assumptions like this risks being, at best, reductive and,at worst, wildly inaccurate.
Neither Anastasia nor Portuguese Lullaby are story songs yet both seem full of yearning for something missing or lost. Equally, Popular Science may or may not be about the limits of human knowledge ("stars and such are out of reach") but in a way it hardly matters.
Instead, it is probably best to enjoy these five tunes as imagist poems tailored for the elegant arrangements although, personally, I also like the idea that they might contain secret messages for revolutionaries hiding in plain sight.
