I love this. It’s been playing on the more discerning radio shows in recent days and has me hankering for the day when I can buy it – something that doesn’t tend to happen as much as I’d like.
It’s called Pharaoh, by Modern Nature.
Steady paced and understated, it’s a lovely unfolding slice of pastoral indie guitar music, the same sort of thing that Teenage Fanclub have politely gone about writing and recording in their Gerry-free autumnal years… only (sorry, Norman) better. Much better.
The vocals might lack TFC’s honeyed harmonic suss, but they’re equally as warm. Close-miked and musing philosophically, snippets of phrases leap out. ‘hedgerow…granite…leaves….mountains…coastal miles…heavy choices…‘ Andrew Weatherall, having played early Modern Nature material on his NTS radio show, was seemingly a big influence on the writing of the track, his ‘fail we may, sail we must’ mantra pushing group leader Jack Cooper to dizzy new heights. Cooper has said that the track is about the people who inspire us to think differently.
It’s the heady combination of voices and guitars that had me from the off.
The two guitar players on Pharaoh mesh and meld, knit and weave, never tying themselves in knots, always creating space for the other player to play in and around. With the combination of woody, humbuckered semi-acoustic and single-coiled Telecaster, there’s a hint of Television in the way the players freeform and switch between fret climbing and chord deconstructing. That’ll be the jazz influence, perhaps.
Pharaoh is, you gotta think, a reference to the spiritual, rule-breakin’/rule-makin’, free-jazz saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders. Inspirational people, remember. But where TV’s Lloyd and Verlaine – also undoubtedly inspirational – slash and tear at their machines like there’s no tomorrow, Modern Nature’s guitars bubble away like a mountain stream on a spring day. A choppy major chord here, an arpeggiated minor there, an insistent and unfaltering signature riff between them, everything clear and ringing like steel drums in the summer sunshine. If you’re like me, it’ll take just one play before the track wends and winds its way quietly into your subconscious.
Modern Nature is a new name to me. It’s always great to find a group that you can work backwards on before going forward with each subsequent record.
Pharaoh is from Modern Nature‘s new album The Heat Warps, released by Bella Union at the end of August. I’ll be ordering it via the band’s Bandcamp page here. Some of you here will, I predict, do likewise.
I was going to call Midlake‘s The Trials of Van Occupanther a modern classic, until it dawned on me that it’s a full fifteen and a half years old. That would have been obvious if I’d stopped to think about it, as the album provided much of the soundtrack while our youngest was bathed, breastfed and brought into this musical household in the autumn of 2006. So classic, yes. Modern, not so much. Sobering as it is, it’s a bit like calling Abbey Road a modern classic in 1985.
You don’t need me to tell you that entire bands come and go in fifteen years. Even Midlake themselves are presently anonymous, on hiatus with the constituent members working on various projects – and nothing disappoints more than bands members ‘working on other projects’ rather than sticking with the band that made so much magic, eh? Never mind, Midlake. We still have The Trials of Van Occupanther. And maybe a new album in ’22 if the rumours are correct?
…Van Occupanther is a phenomenal record, stuffed full of plaintive narratives sung atop rustic, organic instrumentation, the vocal arrangements evoking prime time Laurel Canyon and played by a shit-hot band who’ve clearly spent the months leading up to the record honing and refining every little element of their songs.
It sounds like it could’ve been recorded in the mid 1970s in one of those classic analogue studios, possibly Sound City, possibly Village Recording, with Neil Young next door, Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash smoking pot on the swing on the stoop, The Eagles working out a three-part harmony between punch-ups by the Coke machine, but much of the subject matter suggests the roots of the songs date back to the previous century; to rustic, gold rush America, of bandits and bordellos and when bearded trappers worked the land, when everything was handmade and when life in them thar hills was much harder but oh so much simpler.
Stone cutters made them from stones….mountaineers gathered timber piled high… goes opener Roscoe, all fuzzy warmth and chugging chords, a hint of Christine McVie in the into-the-ether chorus, the spectral, chiffony swirl of Stevie Nicks floating around the edges of the harmonies.
Midlake – Roscoe
Nature and hard work, it seems from the off, are the central themes of the record.
While we were out hunting for food they sing between the piano lines and bluesy runs on Bandits, a song about wishing to be robbed of your worldly possessions by bandits so that you can start life over again (with a rabbit and an ox, no less.) Not many bands write such subject matter, and fewer still manage it with melody squeezed richly from every pore, cascading piano and acoustic guitars ringing and sparkling brightly.
Bring me a day full of honest work and a roof that never leaks and I’ll be satisfied they profer on the very Mac-ish Head Home, all throbbing bass, Californian coke haze vocals and a no-note-wasted, tasteful and lightly toasted guitar break before the final chorus – exactly where the Big Book of Classic Rock Guitar Solos suggests you place it. Bonus ’70s points for the weaving Fender-bending interplay in the long drawn-out coda. FM rock reimagined.
Midlake – Head Home
My young bride, why are your shoulders like that of a tired old woman? With a face made for porridge and stew go the opening and closing lines on Young Bride‘s rootsy minor key hoedown, the bass line revving up and down the fretboard as the Appalachian mountain violin does its best creaky door impression. Trivial fact – both Tim Burgess and Paul Weller love, LOVE!, this song.
I saw she was busy, gathering wood for the fire, they sing on the woozy Americana of Branches before the payoff and clincher; We won’t get married, she won’t have me, she wakes up awfully early these days. By the end of the song, the vocals are tumbling over themselves in an overlapping rush of sepia-tinted melancholy, the piano and woodwind providing the requisite sombre arrangement while the drums batter and clatter to a subtle, banjo-enhanced fade out. The equal of anything by the similarly rustic and on-point Fleet Foxes, it’s fantastic stuff. Fleet(wood) Foxes, anyone?
Midlake – Branches
There’s not a note out of place on …Van Occupanther. Delicately plucked Martins ring out, as deftly picked as a McCartney melody then give way to lean, mean, fizzing and spitting guitar solos that are short enough to defy ‘muso’ cries, but are intricate enough that they could sit in the middle of any Abba or Steely Dan or Supertramp up-tempo number from back in the day and not seem at all out of place.
The whole album comes enveloped in an honest, pensive yet placid melancholy, the aural equivalent of one of those Instagram filters that allows you to make a Lana Del Ray video or your phone snap from an Ibizan beach look like a bleached-out Polaroid from half a century ago…exactly the ‘look’ that the band was going for, I’d wager. America was a country forged from hard work, toil, tragedy and overcoming setback. It’s all there in miniature on The Trials of Van Occupanther. A modern classic by anyone’s definition.
Plain Or Pan 