Buzzin Music Blog

Erland and the Carnival – album review

Erland And The Carnival

Erland and the Carneval’s self-titled debut has been described by Simon Tong (formerly of The Verve, The Good, The Bad & The Queen and The Shining (anyone remember them?)) as a blend of Pentangle, Ennio Morricon, Love, 13th Floor Elevators and Joe Meek. Quite a blend of psychedelic folk then, it seems.

And with song titles like ‘Was You Ever See’, ‘Gentle Gwen’ and ‘One Morning Fair’ you can certainly see the lambswool-jumpered, muddy-peasanted, 60s folk-rock psychedelia that the group, who are led by guitarist and singer Erland Cooper, are trying to promote.

In these cases, where groups are revisiting a past genre without the basis of a ‘scene’ behind them, success depends almost entirely upon whether the project comes across as natural and sincere.

It is hard to fault the group for sincerity. With ‘Love Is A Killing Thing’ (based, apparently, upon a traditional folk song and a Seeger/MacColl chorus), the candid and unpretentious lyrics are laced with a darkness and nicely underpinned by dynamical shifts and interesting synthetic sounds.

The darkness – a sort of deserted-fairground or empty-cinema darkness – is a prevailing theme on the album. Much like The Coral before them, they take the more haunting side of The Doors’ soul and The Beatles’ LSD trips – the racing heart, the warped visions and the feelings of isolation – and turn them into pop songs, such as on the great ‘My Name Is Carnival or on ‘Gentle Gwen’.

For Cooper, who grew up on the fiddle, acoustic guitar and Bert Jansch, the sound is a lot thicker than you might expect. The group sound really tight and the compositions sound very natural.

At times they slip a little into the Franz Ferdinand mode – repeating hackneyed lines for little poetic purpose, such as on ‘You Don’t Have To Be Lonely’ or ‘Trouble In Mind’, but using words from Leonard Cohen (on ‘This Disturbed Morning’) and William Blake (‘The Echoing Green’) turns out to be a masterstroke. Cooper delivers them well and the musical background onto which they are projected is original without being corruptive.

This is a lovely release from Static Caravan / Full Time Hobby, one well worth listening to. Thank goodness Simon Tong left The Shining, right?

Here is their MySpace page.