The A. Lords – S/T

What does it mean to use the sounds of birds and of weather as part of nearly every track of an album of music? In the case of The A.Lords’ new self-titled release, it would seem to be an attempt to bring the music closer to nature, to locate its source and its inspiration in the natural environment…

The choice of acoustic instruments, gentle major-key harmonies, and relaxed tempi would also seem a call to return to a simpler way of life, a state of being more in touch with the world that hums and sings all around us. Guitar, piano and glockenspiel meander and jig through the album’s ten tracks, joined now and then by voices human and avian. The press release lists gardens, churches, a summerhouse and a barn as recording locations, and the occasional pattering of rain and the creaking of barn doors are allowed to bleed into the record. The result is the perfect soundtrack to an English summertime.

But how realistic is this picture of nature that is being painted? Where is the violence and destruction we know is part of the environment? The chaos, the randomness, the tendency towards entropy? Does the nature in the picture really exist, or is it constructed, like the English countryside painted by Constable to hang in the drawing rooms of the newly urbanised industrial class? Is ‘nature’ really how we think we’d want the physical environment around us to be, an imagined primeval source that is in fact imposed in hindsight? A kind of retrospective utopia?

Ah, but the music is so beautiful, so blissful, so far away from the actual physical world we’re happily destroying, and that will probably take us down with it… A timeless charm of summer and Englishness, a natural harmony that has always been and always will be… And as the gentle lullaby of “Pyewacket’s Nest” draws the album to a close with the tinkle of a music box, one finds it so easy to drift off into a dream…

- Nathan Thomas for Fluid Radio

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