Sound of the Sirens – This Time
DMF Records – 25 January 2019
Having made an impressive debut in 2013 with A Long Way To Fall and consolidated that with 2017’s widely acclaimed For All Our Sins, Exeter duo Sounds of the Sirens – Abbe Martin and Hannah Wood – return to seal their reputation with an ambitious and, while essentially two guitars and two voices, musically diverse third album that, part break-up/part self-realisation, features no fewer than 15 tracks, and not a filler among them.
Riding an urgent, almost desert panorama melody, Awakening gives short shrift to an abusive lover in a lyric of self-assertion as they sing that “It’s not ok to make me feel that” and that they “will not compromise/With someone just so unwilling.”
That sense of empowerment and self-belief runs through the album, fuelling Believe with its handclaps and a capella vocals intro to another surging melody line even if the lines “I refuse to lose my vision and my fight/Let me tell you love so holy and divine/That your happiness is intertwined with mine” has more than a hint of a woman scorned.
Slowing the pace down, Another Day is a fingerpicked, picked guitar folk with a tinge of flamenco that asserts “You have to love yourself before you can love anybody else”, returning to the theme of album’s opener with “If I hadn’t seen the light you’d have made me disappear…And I cannot and I will not be the cost of victory”, while Troubles, with its determined chords and piano, calls Thea Gilmore to mind as the duo harmonise with forceful intent to declare “we will never reach the surface/If we are drowning in our tears” concluding in the repeated refrain “you know you’re going to make it.”
The title nodding to The Wizard of Oz, The Yellow Road is another number about a toxic relationship, although here it seems to become addictive as “I built that wall So I couldn’t run” as “Desire takes the blame/Love tells such pretty lies…and…Life tells such ugly truths.”
Such self-examination also veins the likes of the circling deceit-themed All The Webs with its muted, hollow drum beat as the words tumble over one another, while the ambivalent feelings about immersing in a relationship at the risk of losing sight of your individuality would seem to inform such numbers as the largely a capella Keeping Us Alive, the cabaret waltzing The Order and the soaringly jubilant mandolin strum of Lie Awake (another Gilmore-shaded track). The latter also embraces surrender and be damned to love, an open heart capitulation that equally underpins the moody piano waltzing All We Need, the acoustic guitar and piano rumination of Through The Night (“The doors will close but the walls we’ll climb/Always know I’m by your side”).
And, if, at the end of the day, things fall apart and different paths are taken, then it’s not a case of looking back in anger but parting as friends, with Count Our Luck, which might be equally called count our blessings, as Abbe sings “It may not have stood the test of time but I’m proud of what we built/Now go and ask more questions, go and chase your wildest dreams… And I’ll thank my lucky stars I had my time/To hold you dear and know that you were mine.”
It ends with both a parting and a reunion; the mandolin-led, handclapping Four O’Clock closes with “You’ve shown me the way to go/This is goodbye”. while, a lullabying beginning building on drums to take anthemic form, Every Time (on which they soar like a cross between First Aid Kit and the Proclaimers) opens with “I’m the luckiest girl in the world since you came back” and concludes “I’m willing to take on the weight of the world to save you from your pain/I’m willing to walk to the edge of the earth to hear you call my name/I was never myself I was never what I wanted to be/But this time will show us how, this time right now.” We may still be in January, but this is unquestionably an album of the year. Carpe diem.
https://www.soundofthesirens.net/