Two EP releases and countless tours have seen Tall Ships
reach the point where they almost HAD to record a full length album. EP’s are
one thing, impressing people with fifteen minutes of music, but a full length,
keeping people’s attention for forty minutes and beyond is a big task for any
band regardless of their previous output. The fruit of their labour, Everything
Touching, is out on October 8th but having been less than impressed
with the singles it’s spawned so far, will it reach the height of success that
Tall Ships have achieved from their EP releases or will the band be destined to
disappear beyond the first big hurdle?
The singles that I was so hard on, T=0 and especially latest
track Gallop fit perfectly on this record. That isn’t to say that the rest of
the album is as poor as I initially thought the singles were, but more that when
put in a single context, they sounded like a huge departure from the bands
previous math-pop-indie sound. Here their almost rock anthem sensibilities work
as highs alongside what you would expect from Tall Ships given their career so
far. The rousing Gallop, a single that is already having heavy radio play is a
clear attempt at a festival favourite. It’s upbeat, drum heavy and loud but in
true Tall Ships fashion if you pull beneath the surface you’ll find that it is
perhaps one of the more contemplative tracks lyrically on the album about the
process of coping with getting old. It is this depth to the band that makes
them, to me at least, one of the most interesting acts to pop up in the UK
recently. Tracks like Idolatry, Books and Ode To Ancestors each have their own
take on what we consider to be the quintessential Tall Ships sound; soft
sections, often orchestrated and with breathy vocals leaping into bright effect
heavy guitar noise. Books itself, despite being an old track, sounds renewed,
grandiosely backed with a big overblown orchestra that anywhere else on this
album would sound over the top, yet here it makes Books one of the songs to
listen out for. Then there are tracks like Oscar with its jaunty bass guitar
packed indie melody which will no doubt help the band establish themselves with the NME
faithful.
Fifteen minutes of listening to a Tall Ships EP and I was
hooked, the concern here was always whether they could drag that out over a forty minute
album and the answer is yes. There isn’t one point during Everything Touching
that I’m thinking “when will this end?” nor are there any fillers that deserve
to be skipped. Don’t let this mislead you though, this album isn’t perfect,
this isn’t going to be that debut that is so impossible to surpass that it
breaks a band. There are sections of this album where you can truly say that
the band have hit something brilliant but these are often dispersed with these
typical indie NME moments that the band have picked up as they’ve obviously
tried to become more immediate. However with songs as crowd friendly as Gallop entwined with the songs us old fans know and love, you know that Tall Ships are only going to get that little bit more popular and
hopefully with that they are will only get better. For now Everything Touching is a
fantastic listen, and a great place to start on what will hopefully be a
glittering career.
4 / 5
