Get ready to soft-rock once again as Midlake are back with a new album, winding long folky trails back to an era that held tradition high in song. 2ser Subscribers can win a copy all week on Breakfast, Overdrive and Static.
It’s ironic that Midlake’s new album is titled “ The Courage Of Others” because, if anything, the courage is all theirs. Namely, the courage to do what feels right and stay true to the spirit of artistic independence whilst ignoring any pressure to conform to expectations. The result is the Texas quintet’s third album, their most complete and beautiful body of work yet, best appreciated as a whole in the old-fashioned sense of an album.
So what’s changed since "The Trials of Van Occupanther", their second, hugely loved breakthrough album?
Just as that record was in part inspired by the soft(er) rock of the early-to-mid 1970s – from Neil Young and America to F leetwood Mac – so Midlake’s new album also looks to a slightly earlier, and de nitely British, trad-tainted folk sound. It may share the same gorgeously analogue-warm electro-acoustic template as Van Occupanther but it’s a slower, darker and more carved record, both eerier and dreamier.
‘Acts Of Man’ opens the album with an exquisitely fragile mood. The feeling of wanting to escape modern trappings, whether it’s via the innocence of childhood or the simplicity and slow pace of agricultural ways before industrialisation pervades The Courage Of Others. No wonder Brit trad-folk resonates so strongly for Tim. But it’s not all wintry resignation. Next up is ‘Winter Dies’, which heralds not just the renewal of spring but also the guitars that shape the album. Other highlights include ‘Fortune’, the album’s most purely acoustic ballad, ‘Rulers, Ruling All Things’, which features a baroque arrangement of horns while ‘Bring Down’ (with Stephanie Dosen on guest vocals) and ‘The Horn’ share the same intensely moving DNA. Finally, there’s ‘In The Ground’, which closes the album in typically dark, minor-key mood but with another note of optimism, that nature hopefully endures.
