Until The Bird
Album: Pale Clouded Yellow
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 12
Website: http://untilthebird.org/

"Pale Clouded Yellow" opens with a pop folk track, "Trading In Futures", a song that works on so many levels and raises way more questions than it answers. It's not even as simple as deciding to take it on face value or use it as a metaphor for personal projections or a wider impact on society as it slips in and out of those ideas and more.

Similarly there are times when it feels like part of a sound track to a 1960s rights of passage movie, shot mainly in black and white, but with key scenes highlighted in full Technicolor. Until The Bird can operate at that full, epic, opus level, full orchestral sounding, rich backing to a sophisticated sounding, almost jazz vocal.

There are other jazz, classical touches, brass and plucked strings that help build the sense of scale of the album. It's got rich tones and the instrumental passages are both emotive and evocative, there is a real sense that "Pale Clouded Yellow" is an album that knows it's going to be 'big' and scales accordingly.

Get something like this wrong and you've very easily drown both vocal and lyrical content and it's a trap, Until The Bird, manage to avoid with a deftness of movement. The instrumental phrases give you thinking time to absorb the poetry that the band have just delivered, all of which may seem a little highbrow, but it's not, it's about telling you how this particular album has been worked.

There's also a French feel to the album in places, a Gaelic flavour permeates the songs almost at a philosophical level, a sort of shrugging of the shoulders that can say so little and so much at the same time. It's an album that comes already aged, which means it's not going to feel dated at any point, it is contemporary, but does have a foot back in an earlier time and that is also true of the narrative, it almost bemoans a lack of style in the pace of the modern world, where there is no time to really feel and savour, which is precisely something you should with, "Pale Clouded Yellow".

Neil King