Erland & The Carnival – Nightingale

Erland & The Carnival fold the present back upon the past like no other band I can think of. Nightingale’s eleventh track takes its title and inspiration from ‘Dream of the Rood’, a poem widely acknowledged as one of the oldest surviving in English. It’s a curious place to take inspiration for a song, particularly when that song winds up sounding like something from Radiohead’s The King of Limbs. The spidery guitars creak with uncertaintly under Erland Cooper’s millennium-old lyrics, nothing in the song quite seems like it’s in the place it should be, instruments wander in just to fall away mid-way through a verse. The whole thing feels fraying and ready to fall apart at the edges, like a vellum-bound tome excavated from the earth. Yet it’s anachronistically modern; the production is unabashedly a use of modern techniques and methods to re-create those of the past. A bit like using a sepia-filter on your iPhone camera.

This doesn’t feel like affectation, either. Much as I love the Decemberists, their wanton retro-gazing and folky-pastiche sound has always felt secondary to their showmanship and music, at times bordering on the gimmicky. For Erland & The Carnival, it’s paramount, their contradictions and juxtapositions of past against present are essential to their successes. This is their second record in little over a year, and while the craftsmanship remains the same, there’s a definite sense of growth, a willingness to experiment a little more than ever before. ‘I’m Not Really Here’ sees Cooper appropriating Sam Cooke; ‘Wealldie’ is a song about the Egyptian Book of the Dead; ‘Emmeline’’s eerie stereoscopy plays backdrop to a haunting folkloric tale of a girl who runs away from home. While the latter could be seen as a counterpart to their debut’s stand-out moment ‘The Derby Ram’, musically it’s shades more interesting, and all three aforementioned tracks take risks that would have sounded out of place or forced on their more-or-less straight-down-the-line self-titled.

The beating heart of the album is ‘East & West’, a beautiful, brutal and lacerating acoustic-led ballad which at first sounds like a break-up song but on closer analysis could well be an addict’s lament: “Oh where are the minds of my generation / Destroyed by the time that they’re wasting … From me you have stolen the east and the west / Sun and the moon; you’ve taken them from me.” Interestingly positioned, it comes after two of the album’s more up-beat moments—you’d be forgiven for mistaking ‘This Night’ in particular for a Franz Ferdinand number, with its angular guitars and thumping rhythm section. The placement of ‘East & West’ gives it the curious feeling of a come-down, perhaps another reflection of the past in the present, the painful after-affects of a night of too many joys.

Where perhaps Erland & The Carnival fall foul here is in taking things too far, the album is baggy and slightly over-long. Similarly, at times the production values feel too high—one of the greatest charms of their debut was its rough-around-the-edges feel, which is only present on a few tracks here, with others polished a little too cleanly. It’s the creativity on show that makes this album, despite being drenched in its influences and references, sound so thoroughly modern, and that creativity is at risk of being stifled when played too straight—lead single ‘Map of an Englishman’ perhaps falls foul of this particularly bear pit.

It’s a rare moment that I don’t find something to enjoy, though. Nightingale is album that outstrips its predecessor in just about every way. It’s more ambitious, more creative, more well-rounded. Drummer David Nock claimed that the band “wanted to take something even older and make it even newer” than they had with their debut. Judged against this criteria, it’s an unmitigated success.