“There’s poetry in an empty Coke can / There’s majesty in a burnt out caravan”
The mainstream can be an exciting place, and is, sometimes. But ordinarily it’s quite a dirty word, for something so clean. The oddballs know to congregate elsewhere, somewhere darker and with less ventilation. Would David Bowie still become the biggest pop star in the country (or a pop star at all) were he rooting around in the dressing-up box for the first time in 2006? One fears not, but then occasionally there are still bands like Guillemots, sneaking between the lines with stealth flamboyance, proving that hope can amount to something more organic, creative, affecting than a superficially high MTV rotation, staged pull-out quotes and the ringtone chart. The debut album from Guillemots feels like a gift in this context. A gift not just because it undoubtedly offers more than promised, but because it disassembles and distances itself from most comparisons you might have heard or presumed for yourself in the run up to its release, building a dry-stone wall around the perimeter of their cloud, pulling back the corner and letting the sun flood through to offer respite from the drizzle.
Both bands might have made notable contributions in isolation, but the Keane or Coldplay effect has been to standardise piano-led songwriting, to harbour it, to keep it safe from harm. Or, you might say, keep it prisoner – though you wonder about the need for bindings when there’s little desire to stray. Those are not bands to whom Guillemots should be allied. Just watch as they set the concept free like anti-vivisectionists liberating a lab, pulling party-poppers in the dark as they go. This is the whole world of possibilities found under the ajar hood of a grand piano and in the circuitry of a synthesiser. They have much more in common with the perpetually English pop and eccentric sprinklings of 80s era James, the grounded flourishes of Elbow and the optimistic wonder and class of The Flaming Lips at their most considerate. Motivated leader Fyfe Dangerfield himself sings with the wide-eyed anticipation of Wayne Coyne and the clipped colloquial spirituality of Tim Booth, sourcing a maturity beyond his years with which he gracefully and authoritatively delivers memorable poetic twists.
The pace is steady, the likes of ‘If The World Ends’ and ‘Samba In The Snowy Rain’ floating through the frame on warm currents, surrounded by star-gazing string arrangements, beds of brass and subtle psychedelic ad-libs. It is really a very busy album, ideas jostling like rush-hour at Oxford Circus, but with the meditative air of a spring meadow. It proves too that the colourful, refreshing eccentricity of their live shows is not solely responsible for their gathering notoriety – this is by no means a quirky album – there is too much beneath the surface to boil it all down to that. It is the crescendos that make the record though, the glimmering, bounding prom-glam of ‘Trains To Brazil’, the feather-boa orchestral ‘We’re Here’ and the incredible, desperately all-encompassing finale to the 11 minute ‘Sao Paulo’. In fact, what they might have come up with here is something as beautifully groomed as a British ‘Soft Bulletin’.