Muso’s Guide Introduces… There Will Be Fireworks

There Will Be Fireworks

It seems a little trite to talk of a Scottish music renaissance because there has always been an absurdly high number of great bands per head of population; yet this year alone has seen such a rush of great records it’s hard not to think of this as some kind of resurgence: The Phantom Band, My Latest Novel, Frightened Rabbit, We Were Promised Jetpacks, Meursault, The Twilight Sad… Well, into that crowded wedge of bands you can add There Will Be Fireworks who may just have produced the finest record of all of them so far this year. The shocker? At this time, the band remain unsigned.

The facts are these: There Will Be Fireworks are four Glaswegians – old school friends – Adam Ketterer (drums, glockenspiel), David Madden (bass), Gilbran Farrah (guitar, violin, piano) and Nicholas McManus (guitars, vocals, organ). Like WWPJ and The Twilight Sad mentioned above, they make post-rock inflected Big Music – but to these ears they have a greater appreciation of light and shade, a sharper sense of depth and dynamics. They’ve grabbed at a certain strand of post-rock (say Explosions in the Sky and Mogwai) and crushed all that drama into songs – songs that push and thrust at their casings, at times threatening to split apart at the seams.

Their self-titled debut is outsized and sprawling – at times it drifts away on its own sense of ambition. Yet it’s the over-reaching ambition that gives the band their bright allure, their burning core. It also led them to seek out a way to achieve that huge sound. Early recordings had the reach but not the sonic drama. Then the band found a converted 17th-century mill at Stratharven, a giant space of odd angles and high vaulted ceilings. Suddenly they could achieve literal space between their multitude of instruments, and that literal space invaded the recorded sound. There Will Be Fireworks sounds architectural, immense.

You’d think that with all that sonic drama the record might suffer lyrically, but Nicky McManus is a subtle expressive writer. Aside from the opening track and it’s heart-stopping poetic monologue, delivered by Kevin MacNeil, author of The Stornaway Way, the themes are simple but deftly drawn, often mere glimpses into fracturing relationships, or impressionistic vignettes. ‘Midfield Maestro’ has its tape-burning end of relationship blues (“you’re unravelling in my arms”), ‘We Sleep Through The Bombs’ its simple plaintive ache (“I’m going back to the place/where I first saw those shy and tired eyes”); and such is McManuses range that he can shift registers from quite whisper to lacerating roar in the space of a few lines. … Continue Reading