Penguin Cafe have today announced their fifth studio album, Rain Before Seven… out July 7th via Erased Tapes. Their last album, Handful of Night, was released in 2019 and was initially inspired by a 2018 project commissioned by Greenpeace for which Arthur Jeffes, leader of Penguin Cafe, wrote four songs before letting his imagination unleash with a soundtrack for the Antarctic tundra, including a re-interpretation of ‘Pythagoras on the Line Again’ that appeared on ‘Union Cafe’, the final studio album of the original Penguin Cafe Orchestra led by his late father Simon Jeffes.
Alongside the announcement of Rain Before Seven…, they have shared the video and single ‘In Re Budd’. The visuals and backdrop in the video were inspired by the cafe in Simon Jeffes’ infamous fever dream hallucinations, which led to the creation of the original Penguin Cafe Orchestra.
Discussing the track, band leader Arthur Jeffes explains; “This was the first piece I ever wrote on the balafon — and the day I was recording it I heard about Harold Budds’ passing away. I never met him but I’ve always loved his work and I felt that the incongruity of the track wouldn’t be at all inappropriate for a dedication.“
The title of the album, Rain Before Seven…, comes from an old weather proverb with the rhyming prognostication — fine before eleven — hinting at a happy ending, irrespective of the science: “I found it in a book and I’d never heard it before,” says Arthur Jeffes. “It has faintly optimistic overtones and I quite like it. It’s fallen out of usage recently but it does describe English weather patterns coming in off the Atlantic.”
According to the album’s press, the themes explored on Rain Before Seven… transcend mere weather chat. In a sense, it’s a sonic diary scribbled from below the parapet, waiting for the danger to blow over. Jeffes, like many of us, found himself in lockdown in 2020. COVID-19’s first European destination was Italy, where he and his family were staying at the time in a converted convent in Tuscany, bought some twelve years ago with his mother, the celebrated stone sculptor Emily Young. There might be worse places to be stranded during quarantine than a hilly enclave surrounded by olive trees, though the family were faced with the same sobering fears and uncertainties that much of the world was forced to contend with.
The group will be headlining the Erased Tapes label festival at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on May 20, as well as appear at this year’s Wilderness Festival, followed by a UK/Europe tour in November, with plans to tour Japan and North America in early 2024.
Pre-Order the album here: https://www.erasedtapes.com/release/detail/170
Penguin Cafe Live Dates
20.05. Dublin (IE) – Erased Tapes Festival at National Concert Hall
06.07. London (UK) – Rough Trade East (In-Store)
18.07. Oxfordshire (UK) – Wilderness Festival