In the middle of one long sheepless and therefore sleepless night since my fence-leaping flock hoofed it up to Yorkshire to star in Mr Griffin’s video for The Road, I had an idea. Why don’t I do a series of themed reviews around my ‘Music is’ strapline?
Easy* I thought, so this is the first, (*tip: never have an ‘idea’ whilst sleep deprived). Sticking to my blog’s emphasis on great music from British unsigned or smaller, independent bands makes things somewhat harder, but here we go.
My merry-go-round theme features Carousels and Limousines, Albion Sky by Alistair Griffin, Roundabout by The Starkins and Dead Horses by The Lake Poets. Yep, I know Alistair Griffin isn’t a band, but do try to forgive him.
Carousels and Limousines
There’s got to be a joke here somewhere about cars going round roundabouts
Any band with a merry-go-round in its name has got to be worth a listen, so my interest was piqued by Bath rock band Carousels and Limousines.
I’m really liking their newer songs from EP Strange Love which have a much more interesting sound than those on the slightly pedestrian-rock 2013 album Home to Andy’s.
My favourites are the eerily-super Superman and the strangely fascinating Strange Love, well worth checking out on their SoundCloud page. Lead vocalist Sam Gotley has some smooth, dark-gravely tones going on in their tracks.
Sam also plays guitar, and the band is completed by Jamie Wales on guitar and vocals, Finn McNulty on bass, Martyn James on drums and Dominik Sky on keys and vocals. They gig a lot which is great – in June, they played the storm-interrupted Friday shift at Glastonbury’s Avalon Café, spent September gigging in America and are now back in the UK with several dates in London, Bath and Bristol before the end of the year.
Albion Sky by Alistair Griffin
Albion’s sky comes in 57 varieties and some are sunny and some will rain on you from a great height
Alistair Griffin is a singer-songwriter from North Yorkshire, who I’ve featured in Music Matters. In July I reviewed his new album From Nowhere, and it’s well worth a listen.
“You get blown by the wind
Try to find the truth
but the answers lie within
So you take the ride and you
get so high on this glorious
merry-go-round called lifeAnd if you want to I will take you with me
I may be fortunes fool but please forgive meIf I tell you all my secrets tonight
As we lay beneath the albion sky
Nothing in my pocket
Living but I’ve already died
Can men be born again”
Albion Sky is a song Griffin wrote with Paul Banks (of Shed Seven), which was on his previous album. It’s got a thoughtful lyric and as all good songs should, there’s a merry-go-round in it. Just about. It’s about life of course, not a real merry-go-round, but then I’m not referring to them in actuality either!
“To be free but never free
From the ghosts that walk inside of me”
It’s so relatable it pulls you in which is why the song is so inspiring. Impressively, it even has a ghost to perplex ghost-hunters stumbling upon my blog even more! So all good.
The album version’s track grows into a noisy-synth layered rouser, but this is also a totally beautiful acoustic song if performed stripped back. When on form, Griffin sings this live with a deeply heartfelt, pin-drop vocal that doesn’t seem to translate to record.
Here’s a particularly good live interpretation from a concert at Sheffield City Hall:
The recorded album version is sung in a way to suit the harsher synthy track. Here’s a clip which disastrously cuts out the merry-go-round; how could anyone do that!?!
But the merry-go-round makes it into the full song, and that’s the important thing!
Roundabout by The Starkins
Tip: write about a roundabout so you get to go on one for your video
The Starkins are a young indie guitar-pop band from the Sheffield area of South Yorkshire, made up of brothers Matt and Joe Elliss on guitar and drums respectively, Will Campbell on bass and Andy Daniels on vocals.
Roundabout was their début single, released on Club Fandango back in February this year, and is a totally stomping mover with a lot of head spinning.
It reminds me just a little bit of a yet-to-mature, unrefined version of The Lurios, and I’ll be interested to see where they’ve got to with their sound in a couple of years time.
Kudos for courageously including such smilers in the lyric as: ‘But when I open up my mouth, absolutely nothing that makes sense comes out’, which I think most of us can relate to at one time or another! Not that it can top their song that rhymes bitter with followers on Twitter…
The band’s next single, The Night, is out on 28 October and is another one for the youngsters, but it’s certainly got a lot of energy and enthusiasm. I think there are better tracks though, such as the chilled Sunset Valley, (although this struggles a little towards the end), and the irrepressible Funky Beats.
The band gig a lot and have dates coming up, mainly in the Yorkshire area, details on the band’s website.
Dead Horses by The Lake Poets
Almost certainly not about painted horses with stripy poles
In case you’re still jumping round the room after that last track, here’s something to bring you down again from The Lake Poets aka Sunderland singer songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Martin Longstaff, who performs as a solitary poet as well as a band of poets!
Almost certainly not referring to painted horses on stripy poles, the dark and hauntingly sad Dead Horses is, in the writer’s words: ‘A song about the futility of blaming others for your problems’.
It’s a track from debut EP, Honest Hearts, which sounds to me to be about feelings from a time when life was broken. The writer says it: ‘Documents a time that is best remembered as being best forgotten, a dark period of time in which it looked like all hope was lost’.
These are not songs to listen to if your cat has just died. They’re very beautiful and relatable though, which is what draws me into his music.
The Lake Poets has several gigs coming up. Check his website for details.
What do you think of these bands and songs? Let me know in the comments below.
[Photo credit: merry-go-round image courtesy of Simon Howden at FreeDigitalPhotos.net]
I heard a ghost 
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