On the face of it, Stornoway’s debut is an album of unaffected choir-boy vocals accompanied by all male folk-singers (to be really reductive, it sounds a little bit like a grown-up Aled Jones backed up by The Dubliners). Add to these reductive tendencies, the fact that Stornoway’s debut album is bound to be lumped in with the new wave of British suburban folk music (Noah And The Whale, Mumford and Sons etc), and people from the sensation-obsessed music industry will complain that they’ve heard it before.
I have heard it before. But so what? I had never heard anything like Metal Machine Music and that was shit. Furthermore, the folk tag is a bit misleading. While some of the songs do sound like the work of unionised 1950s farm hands, with their massed harmonising vocals, picked banjos and messages about free-expression and brotherly love (‘We Are The Battery Human’, ‘Here Comes The Blackout’), for the most part Stornoway’s suburban bedroom-indie roots out themselves, with melodies that wouldn’t go astray on a Belle and Sebastian album, rhythm tracks that wouldn’t be lost on an Arcade Fire record, and themes and metaphors that are plucked straight from the ‘burbs. Indeed, after a few listens the middle-English accent and folk trappings are distilled away and what’s left in the memory is a batch of decent guitar-pop tunes delivered with conviction. Good on ‘em.