I am not a musician. There, I’ve said it. I once snapped a recorder in half during one particular volatile outburst on account of my inability to master ‘London’s Burning‘. I was 23 at the time!
I was reminded of this fact in no uncertain terms by the unwavering Mumford & Sons fan base who took to Twitter to blitz me with abuse simply for daring to suggest that their second album might be marginally flawed. The most erudite comment I received simply enquired as to how many albums I had released albeit his missive was a hotchpotch of expletives. But the message was one I took to heart and rarely will I lambast any artist simply because I have little perception of what it takes to create an album.
However…
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with The Travelling Band other than 80% of them have beards. Anyone who can lay claim to have lasted a decade in the industry must have something going for them right? Well, no, not really. When you are on the verge of releasing your fourth studio album and the most interesting item on your Wikipedia page is that you were victims of crime to the tune of £30k then something must have gone badly awry. Evidently, the band think so too with two of the founding members having taken their ball home amidst rumours of fractured relationships all round. Sometimes, this can lead to an outpouring of creativity and sometimes you’re left with Sails.
It’s not that Sails is bad, it isn’t. However, it is all over the place like a drunken Aunt at a wedding and I struggled to glean any relevance in today’s world; the album could easily have been recorded a decade earlier and hints at a band who have failed to move with the times. Album opener ‘Moments Like Switches’ is little more than a Keane pastiche, it’s not putrid but it just scuttles along with some nice keys until the lads go all Catfish & The Bottlemen on us come track two, ‘Wasted Eyes’. And so it goes…
‘Into The Water’ staggeringly only lasts a shade over four minutes and yet it feels like I’ve grown a Travelling Band beard in the time it takes to conclude; there are strings, horns and an acoustic guitar all taking turns in the spotlight and if that doesn’t sway you into believing they are mere Mumford & Sons replicants then they catapult in a needless f-bomb just to provide a degree of menace. As for ‘Loser’, well, it’s just ‘Creep’ stripped bare and devoid of the self-loathing it requires.
OK, so perhaps The Travelling Band have caught me on a bad day, although ‘Failure Is A Bastard’ is a reminder that the internal divisions within the band have not given rise to a subtle and impish sense of self-reflection. There are redeeming features on Sails, ‘Unlike You’ harks back to the sort of Americana they were originally so proud of and ‘Last Night I Dreamt (of Killing You)’ is uncannily reminiscent of the much-underrated Diesel Park West and Shakespeare Alabama, in particular. These two tracks alone indicate that Sails had a painful ingestion and the lads need to vehemently stick, limpet-like, to what they do best and not try and please everyone all the time.
What we’re left with is an adult colouring book by numbers of tunes which sound dated and even the band members appear bored, which they probably are. The Travelling Band are no mugs and don’t deserve to be portrayed as low-order V Festival fodder but that’s what Sails offers up. I await the critical backlash from their rampaging hoards via Twitter but deep down, you know I’m right.
Sails is released on August 25th on Sideways Saloon Records
