Erland & The Carnival – Nightingale (Full Time Hobby)
4/5
By: Christiana Spens
On the cover of the new album by London-based trio Erland & the Carnival is a young girl called Janet Hodgson being thrown across her bedroom by the “Enfield poltergeist” – a much-debated oddity of the late seventies, supposedly captured on camera here for a documentary.
“I remember seeing the shot in a book when I was a kid and it always stuck with me” recalls Simon Tong, (previously guitarist in The Verve and The Good, the Bad and the Queen, and live occasionally for Gorillaz and Blur). “It influenced the music because we’re trying to create a soundtrack to an imaginary horror film about the supernatural.”
And they’ve definitely succeeded at that. With lead Erland Cooper, and drummer David Nock, the band (who have been together less than two years), have produced a dark, trippy, twisted second album.
Drawing on an impressive wealth of experience, myth, and curios, Erland & the Carnival have created pop songs not only with musical substance but with stories behind them as well. The actual recording of the album took place deep in a ship moored at Embankment on London’s River Thames, where the band found the musty air and cabin fever created an ambience they could exploit in the music.
As well as using the echoes of the Thames in several tracks, the band also took inspiration from the Egyptian Book of the Dead (for ‘We All Die’) – and Dream of the Rood, one of the oldest poems in written form, for a track of the same name. ‘Map of an Englishman’ a hyper, surreal pop-song, was apparently inspired by Grayson Perry’s work of the same name, and the dark, decadent ‘Emmeline’ is sourced from AA Milne’s Before Tea and Alice in Wonderland.
But the whole album does not really sound like an odd combination of bedtime stories – more a surreal nightmare of old horror movies, laced drinks, and vaguely familiar dream sequences.
“It’s the handshake on the way to the strange psychedelia within.” Explains the drummer. “After that, it’s like being at a Halloween party: you’ll get acid dropped in your drink and wake up naked on a beach in Orkney 17 hours later.”
Musical memoirs of an acid trip this album might be, and it’s fun, and odd, and lovely as you might expect from all the stories you’ve heard. But the strengths, from listening to the album on repeat a few times, are the less experimental, less obscure tracks – ‘So Tired in the Morning’, a melodramatic, lustful drawl of unrequited love and distraction – ‘Map of an Englishman’, a twilit, angsty, Blur-like dissent. And ‘Nightingale’ – a dreamy, broken love song, a drunken reminiscence.
It is hard not to fall into a dream with even the more grounded of the songs, though. If Erland & the Carnival wanted to create a playfully supernatural album, with a consistently beautiful undertone of melancholy and a sound the soft side of drunken sailor, then they have succeeded with such grace that we can only assume that indeed, that was exactly what they had in mind at the start.
Erland & The Carnival - "Nightingale" by Yep Roc Music Group
Artists in this article: Erland and the Carnival
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