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Order the new CD, Courage Of Others by Midlake and get a limited* autographed CD Booklet with purchase!
About Midlake:
Midlake is both out of time and way ahead of it. The Denton, Texas band's 2006 release, The Trials of Van Occupanther, was not only an inspired set of sadly gorgeous psychedelic pastoral rock, but also got both fans and bloggers re-evaluating dormant sonic ancestors like Fleetwood Mac, America, Crosby Stills, Nash & Young, and Bread's music that has been embedded in the indie world's unconscious (Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear) ever since.
On their third album, The Courage of Others, Midlake are still themselves and yet completely reinvented, so much so that between the time they started working on the record and the time they finished it, the title track was re-recorded down to every note, simply because they'd turned into a more accomplished and ambitious band. "It didn't sound like us anymore," says frontman and songwriter Tim Smith.
Produced and recorded by the band - Smith, guitarist Eric Pulido, drummer McKenzie Smith, bassist Paul Alexander and keyboardist Eric Nichelson - at their own studio (and mixed by Centromatic's Matt Pence at The Echo Lab), The Courage of Others is a stunning distillation of Midlake's gift for heartbreaking melodies and ornate soundscapes - songs like "Winter Dies" and "Core of Nature" have both the epic sweep of early prog-rock and the fingers-on-guitar-strings rawness of acoustic music. To call it "eagerly awaited" is an understatement - the disc appeared on Under the Radar's "Most Anticipated Albums" list for both 2008 and 2009.
After coming off the road behind ...Van Occupanther, "we spent probably a year just trying to figure out what we wanted to sound like," says Smith. New influences took hold, both classic and contemporary, from British folk to Russian cinema (The Courage of Others' cover art was inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rubleev). "Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal," Tarkovsky once said. And the ideal, well...it doesn't happen overnight. Or easily.
Because of the band's arduous approach, it wasn't until January of 2008 that The Courage of Others really came together - and it took leaving the studio for that to happen. "We just needed a breath of fresh air," says Pulido. "When I was young, I used to go out to this farm (the Sand Hill Ranch, in Buffalo, TX). We'd hunt and fish and cook out. I called up the family that owns it and they let us come hang out." They brought their instruments and some recording gear, just to fool around.
"We worked on one song, 'Core of Nature,' kind of by accident," says Smith. "I didn't really have it all written, but it just turned out." The song title comes from a Goethe quote that Smith had been using as both inspiration and a kind of placeholder for melody and chord progression. "Then I realized I would never write a better phrase." After returning from this little field trip, the entire record came together - a seven or eight month recording process after what you might call 18 months of "pre-production."
While some bands play it coy about their influences, Smith remains an unabashed lover of music who considers new discoveries a vital part of his creative process. He never shied away from Fleetwood Mac comparisons, and, with increasingly more flute on The Courage of Others (a proxy for Smith's saxophone, which he doesn't think fits into Midlake's sound) he'll own up to Jethro Tull as well. When you're making confident music that achieves its own originality and beauty, you're not afraid to give credit where its due. British prog-folk bands like Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, Amazing Blondel and the Strawbs also caught Smith's attention as he woodshedded before writing and recording.
All the lyrics have an abstract quality, the way they feel as much as what they say, "A lot of times for me there's certain words that sound good when I sing them, but also lots of physical and geogaphrical rooting: rain, land, woods, valley ground, skies." What people heard as Americana-ish on Van Occupanther, Smith thought of more as the Bavarian Forest or the British countryside. But, one song on the new record, "Small Mountain," is inspired by his parent's old place in Bandera, Texas, just outside the Hill Country.
The opening song, "Acts of Man," was an anomaly, as it was reoorded in a mere five days. "That never happens for us!" says Smith. "I guess on average it took about a month per song, but that's who we are. That's how long it takes us to arrange the songs and figure out the best way to make something beautiful." |
