Treetop Flyers – Treetop Flyers
Loose – 24 August 2018
Reid Morrison, Sam Beer and Laurie Sherman have come a long way since winning the Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent Competition back in 2011. Following on from their 2013 debut album, The Mountain Moves, and its critically acclaimed follow-up, Palomino, three years later the Treetop Flyers now a quintet with the addition of drummer Rupert Shreeve and Danny and the Champions of the World saxophonist Geoff Thomas Widdowson, the London-based folk rock outfit returns with a pointedly eponymously titled third album that, as such, serves to underscore their musical self-confidence as well as standing as a statement of identity while staying true to their 60s West Coast and psychedelia influences.
The sound of a fierce wind blowing opens proceedings, but the moment the music sets in Flea Drops reveals itself as a dreamy instrumental, its placement at the start of the album another testament to the band’s confidence. Morrison’s tremulous falsetto introduce Sweet Greens & Blues, the track unfolding into tempo shifting soulful pop, Widdowson’s sax playing the track out and into the old school soul shuffle of It’s Hard To Understand with its mellotron washes, sax and steady march beat.
Beer takes over vocal duties for Kooky Clothes, a moody, echoey psychedelic kiss off blues (“you don’t owe me anymore, leave me alone”) that nods to CS&N influences with Beer and Morrison’s guitars coming together for the close.
Pointing to their willingness to experiment, the blissfully laid-back Needle is based around the noise of a vinyl record when the needle reaches the end of the grooves and just loops over and over like a narcotic drum pattern. Morrison says it stemmed from a Ted Hawkins disc, but the echoey undulating guitar sound on which it’s built is decidedly redolent of Peter Green’s playing on Albatross. One to be listened to on headphones while relaxing in a floatation tank.
Given a ballad arrangement, Astral Plane is probably the folksiest number, but, with its shimmering mellotron at the end, again set in the aural context of getting stoned in the Laurel Canyon hills. The tempo picks up on the soulfully catchy Warning Bell throughout which the spirit of Alex Chilton hovers arm in arm with The Young Rascals, followed, in turn, by the eight minute, shape-shifting psych-soul jam of Art Of Deception which will inevitably draw comparisons to the Grateful Dead but which, I’d venture, also owed a considerable debt to The Chambers Brothers and America.
Stripped back to finger-picked American folk basics, I Knew I’d Find You is a simple acoustic close harmony song about love as a salve for depression, the album fading away on another instrumental, the wistful, melancholic guitar and saloon piano notes of Door 14.
Whilst it’s arguably not as immediately accessible or as radio-friendly as its predecessor, this is the assured sound of a band that has grown into itself and with the certainty that it can carry its audience with it and build an even bigger following on the journey.
Treetop Flyers Live dates:
23 August – The Lexington, London (album launch)
8 September – Long Road Festival
22 November – The Scala, London – supporting Israel Nash