Last Days - The Safety Of The North (n5MD, 2009)

mp3 / 320 / 155mb / rs | rel. mar 09

www.n5md.com

"Running through Last days' The Safety Of The North there's an elaborate, very clearly defined narrative. The album tells the story of protagonist Alice and her parents as they settle for a new life in a remote northern land. This curious, tragic yarn is told through excerpts of dialogue, monologue and textured instrumentation. According to Last Days' Graham Richardson the album is divided into fifteen 'scenes' rather than tracks, and the producer goes out of his way to make every bar of his music evocative of a specific segment of his story. Inevitably, without language this all takes on a more impressionistic tone, which proves to be no bad thing: the opening 'The City Failed' busies itself with stormy field recordings, marking a transition between the steely guitar-spun quiet and a more raw and chaotic sonic environment. Next comes the more illustrative 'May Your Days Be Gold', a vocally fronted piece that makes the tale a little clearer, but soon enough field recordings and intensely atmospheric post-rock passages arrive, guiding us through the subtly magnificent 'Fracture' and the Tape-like tuneful electroacoustics of 'New House'. As the album develops it only seems to get more involving, turning out stunning electronic/classical hybrids like 'Missing Photos' (which would be equally at home on Make Mine Music as it would a Kompakt Pop Ambient selection) and the glacially paced elegy 'Blue And White Flowers' which is part Max Richter, part Sigur Ros. It's so easy to be massively put off by any sort of story-based concept album, particularly when the recordings in question are chiefly instrumental affairs and don't explicitly outline anything in particular, but The Safety Of The North quickly sheds its conceptual baggage, winning you over with its clearly defined emotional poise and all-round compositional elegance. This third Last Days album is quite an achievement and surely one of the very finest things the n5MD label has released in some time. Highly recommended."-boomkat