gUiLLeMoTs – Hello Land!
May 10, 2012Where have the Guillemots been recently? The British avant-garde beat combo absconded from the UK scene to write and record a new album in a mere fortnight. In Norway.
Completely unannounced till just a couple of days ago, Hello Land! has been made available for instantaneous free streaming via the marvel that is Soundcloud. And here it is…
Oh, and did you know that this is planned to be the first of four LPs in 2012? They’re going to be loosely based around the seasons.
No pressure then. I mean, hey, the Beatles chucked out 2 albums a year at peak.
Away from the limiting and highly-structured commercial music industry of the big labels, it seems to me they’ve rediscovered their experimental roots. Initial impressions of Hello Land! are of a luscious but not unsophisticated lightness.
It is a departure from the hit-single focused efforts that has perhaps held Guillemots back in recent years (in this writer’s humble opinion). They’re not trying too hard to be something they’re plainly not. Not until they’re ready to take over the world.
(What a horribly cynical reason to make music. But baby needs shoes, right?)
Looking back on Guillemots’ output, following an erupting romantic rush of excitement felt within debut Through The Windowpane, its successors Red and Walk The River were somewhat staid affairs overall and never quite met up to the delirious bombast of their first release.
Fyfe Dangerfield has explained the rationale behind the departure from the traditional music biz mould as follows:
I was just a bit lost in the music industry, you can get very lost in the music business. It’s not like I hate the music industry. I think it’s just you can get very immersed in it without even realising and there are so many patterns and waves that you expect to do things. I think we were just used to playing the line without realising. The one thing we were really getting frustrated by was this album cycle.
You generally spend a few months at a time making a record and then you kind of sit on them for a time. It’s very hard to be creative, I think we started realising we don’t need to do this. We thought why not put out loads of music and do it ourselves!
You can support the band by giving them your money and buying their CD or MP3/WAV downloads by clicking this link:
http://guillemots.greedbag.com/buy/hello-land-0/
What’s that you say? A fiver for a whole album? I remember when non-chart CDs were £16.99 in the Rock ‘n’ Pop section of HMV back in the mid 1990s, when I were a teenager.
Oh, just whilst I remember, Guillemots are also headlining our pals’ festival 2000 Trees this year.
