THE WALKABOUTS chief songwriter Chris Eckman is in transit, having just left Freiburg near the German/Swiss border. This is apt: the travelling motif is a defining characteristic of one of Seattle s most underrated and enduring acts it s no coincidence many of us would have first heard vocalist Carla Torgerson s gorgeously warm tones on the classic Tindersticks single Travelling Light .
And, as Eckman writes in the press release for the band s new opus Trail Of Stars: all of the Walkabouts albums have been awash with images of travel and motion. That is where the trail comes in the characters of these songs are somehow part of that continuous journey, although this time the signposts are not on the side of the road they are lit in the sky.
Trail Of Stars was recorded in a snow-bound mountain town just outside Seattle, and sounds it the frozen clarity of tunes like Desert Skies and Gold could only have been conceived in the northern hemisphere. Initially, the record was intended as a back-to-basics re-integration exercise following a year-long sabbatical, but as the music evolved, it demanded a larger palette, including strings, woodwinds and sundry orchestral elements. The resulting mood is one of cabin fever framed against the vast expanse: songs for the stranded.
I think when you re pushed off by yourself, you tend to have to create this little world amongst yourselves, Chris confirms, and I guess that s what we were doing. I think we re sort of used to that. We made a record in 1996 called Devil s Road in the countryside in Germany, at Conny Plank s studio, which is famous for electronic music. Actually our friends the Tindersticks turned us onto that, they had done their second album there.
Unsurprisingly then, the Walkabouts music suggests a kind of mythic Americana tempered with European sensibilities. When pressed, Eckman admits to feeling a certain vague commonality with Mercury Rev and The Flaming Lips, as well as an age-old affection for Can, Neu, Kraftwerk and Brian Eno. The net widens even further when I mention Mary Margaret O Hara s Euro-Canuck classic Miss America, which the guitarist describes as a huge record for us, actually. She s such a great, great talent.
Trail Of Stars was produced by Phill Brown, who got the job largely by dint of his naturalistic work on Talk Talk albums such as Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock. This echoes the band s decision to record with Victor Van Vugt on previous outings, chosen not for his work with Beth Orton and Nick Cave, but for a ten-year tenure as live soundman with those other 80s saviours, the Triffids.
But as well as an air of agoraphobic isolation (patented by the late David McComb and co on Born Sandy Devotional) Trail Of Stars also evokes a tangible end-of-century vertigo, most acutely evident on Last Tears .
I wrote these songs in Lisbon by myself, Chris explains. I think it started as this sort of introspective record, and then I realised that it s kind of stepping back from things, which is what a lot of people are doing at the millennium anyway, and a lot of times falsely. Even Last Tears is meant to be a bit ironic in the sense that the line is, The last tears of the century/They keep on coming .
We don t just start over or clean the slate somehow because we have this artificial calendar change, he elaborates. But it is kind of, Where do I sit in the world, where does our band sit in the world, where does anyone sit right now? There are a lot of questions on the album actually, not a lot of answers, but I think because we created this almost serene space in places, there s also a sense of possibility. It s not just like a dead
end somehow. n
Trail Of Stars is out now on Grapevine.