Guillemots – Walk The River
The emergence of Guillemots around 2006 was, for me at least, a genuine breath of fresh air. At a time when the horrors of landfill indie were just starting to infiltrate pop music like the gradual and horrible dawning realisation of a particularly rotten fart, their blend of the expansive and the offbeat were a glorious escape, doubly so in the live arena. Appropriately, their debut album Through the Windowpane, though flawed, seems to have been remembered fondly for its ambitiously panoramic shots of idealism. Follow-up, Red, however, struggled to garner the same acclaim, as the band’s laudable apparent determination not to repeat Through the Windowpane’s formula saw their playful side get the better of them. The result was a record which, though not short on highlights, lacked the coherence of its predecessor, and which left you ultimately feeling pretty disoriented.
Guillemots - Walk The River
So, after Fyfe’s recent diversion into troubadour territory with Fly Yellow Moon, it feels like there’s a lot riding on Walk the River. The success of his solo adventures (aided of course by the unlikely combo of Billy Joel and John Lewis) have meant that he and his band of merry misfits occupy a more prominent spot on the radar than they would have done had this record appeared straight after Red. The three year gap also means the band have effectively been able to start again from square one, redefining the idea of what a Guillemots album is supposed to sound like, because, well, most people have pretty much forgotten what that entails.
On the whole, the breathing space has done them good. First and foremost, Walk the River has emphatically addressed the fundamental flaw of Red, because its twelve songs hang together in gratifyingly easy and logical fashion, making complete sense as an album in the fullest sense of the word. In fact, it’s probably Guillemots’ most cohesive record yet. Whether this is a conscious reaction to the bemusement which characterised much the reaction to Red, or whether Fyfe simply feels more like a songwriter than an experimental pop loon nowadays is unclear, but make no bones about it, Walk the River feels much more like a follow-on to Fly Yellow Moon than to Red.
At its peaks, Walk the River is wonderful. Fyfe has honed that little-boy-lost-in-the-world croon to an absolute art, suffusing his vocal with a warmth that nobody can truly match. There’s a point just over the two-minute mark in ‘I Don’t Feel Amazing Now’, when even I, an emotionally stunted, generally misanthropic Geordie, find it difficult to supress an overwhelming urge to put an arm round his shoulder and give him a great big manly cuddle to ease his travails.
The elongated heartache of ‘Sometimes I Remember Wrong’ is similarly endearing, although it also inadvertently draws attention to the album’s weakest feature, which is the fact that there’s absolutely no need for it to run to sixty-five minutes. Maybe Guillemots have been encouraged by the all-conquering success of Arcade Fire’s sprawling monster of a third album, but the key difference between The Suburbs and Walk the River is that the former doesn’t really sag in the middle or drift inconsequentially on occasion like the latter does. More specifically, it’s some point around ‘Ice Room’ where I feel my attention wander a little, and save for the Elbow-esque prettiness of ‘Inside’ which draws me back in briefly, it’s not until ‘Slow Train’ that my mind returns fully to the record.
Once you’re sucked back in though, it’s pretty much plain sailing from then on, with lead single ‘The Basket’ stirring up fond memories of ‘Trains to Brazil’ with its impressively direct pop thrills, and ‘Yesterday is Dead’ providing a beautiful, sweeping finale to the album which is up there with most of Through the Windowpane. By the time its final strains have faded out, and you’re left to bask in that thoughtful post-album afterglow, there’s a fair chance you’ll be left with some decidedly mixed feelings. Walk the River, as the title hints, is a real journey, and a pretty exhausting one on the whole, but it shows you some absolutely stunning sights on the way. But the times when the route becomes unclear and you’re left to wander unguided leave a bit of an unpleasant taste, which mean that ultimately, it’s difficult to enjoy it as much as you might like. But hey, Guillemots have always been a band whose flaws have been as endearing as their successes, and if nothing else, Walk the River shows that they are still just as worthy of getting excited over as they were five years ago.
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