Lanterns on the Lake — Beings (November 13, 2015)

      ^{Lanterns on the Lake — Beings (November 13, 2015)} •    Lanterns On The Lake formed in 2007.
•    The band have played a host of music festivals including End of the Road Festival, Glastonbury Festival, SXSW, and Bestival.Location: Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Album release: November 13, 2015
Record Label: Bella Union Records
Duration:     41:08
Tracks:
01. Of Dust & Matter     5:00
02. I’ll Stall Them     4:07
03. Faultlines     5:14
04. The Crawl     4:09
05. Send Me Home     2:26
06. Through the Cellar Door     2:56
07. Beings     6:26
08. Stepping Down     4:23
09. Stuck For An Outline     4:35
10. Inkblot     1:52
℗ 2015 Bella Union
•    Hazel Wilde — vocals, guitar, piano (2007–present)
•    Paul Gregory — guitar, backing vocals, producer (2007–present)
•    Oliver Ketteringham — drums, piano (2007–present)
•    Bob Allan — bass (2014–present)
Live and Affiliated members:
•    Angela Chan — violin, cello, viola (2014–present)
Past members:
•    Sarah Kemp — violin (2008–2014)
•    Andrew Scrogham — bass (2012–2014)
•    Brendan Sykes — bass (2008–2012)
•    Adam Sykes — vocals, guitar, piano (2008–2012)      © Lanterns on the lake live at the Junction 2 in Cambridge on 21 October 2013
Album Review
•    Following a couple more lineup changes but with the founding core of singer Hazel Wilde, multi–instrumentalist Paul Gregory, and drummer Oliver Ketteringham still intact, Lanterns on the Lake present Beings, their absorbing third long–player. Written and recorded as a group in the band’s rehearsal space with Gregory again overseeing production, the album doesn’t mark a change in direction so much as an expansion; their signature atmospheric despondence remains but with scaled–up textures for lusher climaxes and, more to the point, starker contrasts. The loose and spacy opener, “Of Dust & Matter,” for instance, has a broad range of instruments and effects, including much that is unidentifiable: what sound like processed samples, sci–fi film–like murmurs, and eerie thumps alongside marching keyboard chords, wailing electronics, full drums, and chiming electric guitars. At times the spooky mélange falls away to reveal only piano tones, guitar, and rueful vocals before building again. It’s a particularly Siouxsie Sioux–evoking track with lyrics about “creatures,” “dust,” and “a town void of life.” The solemn title track is similarly expansive and lustrous. While most of the songs are more conventional structure–wise, the otherworldliness permeates the album via weeping instrument timbres and lyrics like “I want to feel human” and “In another lifetime I thought I saw you peering through the cracks of age.” Beings also offers the driving, poppier “Faultlines” and stripped–down moments like the folkier “The Crawl.” All in all another strong outing from the Newcastle band, it dwells in a cloudy blend of dreams and creeping nightmares, unsettling yet captivating.               © Lanterns On The Lake, Bush Hall London, credit Eleonora Collini
Review
•    Work on Beings began in February 2014, hard on the heels of successful tours of Europe and North America. It proved to be a productive period. “The ideas came effortlessly and in abundance,” vocalist Hazel Wilde says of the writing process. “At first we had no expectations, no prescribed ideas of how we wanted the songs to turn out. We were just writing and playing together because that’s what we’d always done.”
•    This was made possible by their setup, working in splendid isolation; writing, rehearsing and recording in their Newcastle rehearsal room meant the results were undiluted by outside influence. Imaginatively produced and mixed by guitarist Paul Gregory, it’s also his experience that helped yield such compelling results.
•    This allows Beings to move seamlessly from airy, chiming beauty to dense, forbidding soundscapes — sometimes in the same song — while still feeling like the product of a cohesive unit, retaining the band’s spark. “We wanted it to be more raw,” Wilde says of the record. “At its darkest points, we wanted it to feel like you’d dived into the deepest part our dreams and were taking a look around. At its lightest we wanted it to feel like you were coming up for air.”
•    Opening song ‘Of Dust and Matter’ strikes just such a balance. The band’s most sinister moment yet, it prowls out of a burble of radio static and feedback, propelled by ominous piano chords as its menacing pulse builds to a tumbling climax of almost discordant, warped guitar parts and the fractured drumming of Ol Ketteringham. “In my greatness I vowed to destroy all I am,” Wilde sings. “It brings out the best in me.”
•    It’s an interesting early lyric, and it soon becomes apparent that this is a braver, more headstrong Lanterns on the Lake, a band now less about floating on water than racing across land, eager and with points to prove. Often their melancholy necessarily turns to action. “Fractured lives like faultlines, unto the breach my friends if you will” is Wilde’s call to arms on ‘Faultlines’, a critique of austerity, as the band turn in a cavalry charge with her voice as the clarion call.
•    Wilde’s lyrics also shudder with evocative and often surprisingly dark imagery in songs that attempt to understand the world around her, built from charged moments of universal insight. “There is a sense of the need to connect to something; the need to find meaning,” she says of the material. “There’s such frustrating injustice in the world, yet this feels like a time of disconnection where we’re encouraged to celebrate the shallow side of culture. This record carries that sense of yearning for something greater.”
•    This gives Beings immediacy, depth and resonance as it touches on community, love, culture, politics and self–examination, and our own place and limitations within each. “I want to walk with the brave, give me a good day, I want to feel human” Wilde sings on the graceful ‘I’ll Stall Them’, exploring the importance of connection, kinship and reconciliation.
•    Beings is the engrossing product of a band operating in total harmony to the point where their music creates its own idiosyncratic world whilst also distilling outside concerns into it. The horizons open to Lanterns on the Lake are now as broad as the sweep of these beautiful songs.
Website: http://www.lanternsonthelake.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lanternstalk
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LanternsOnTheLake
Press: (press) / (online)
Agent:
UK/ EUROPE: Matt Hanner —
USA: Matt Hickey — Biography
•    Originally formed in Newcastle in 2008, Lanterns on the Lake combined dreamy indie rock with beautiful layers of texture and celestial melodies that thread around intricate instrumentation. The six–piece came together after playing in various bands on the local scene and having known each other in various other capacities. Vocalist and guitarist Hazel Wilde was engaged to Paul Gregory (guitars, electronics) and both were in a band with drummer Oliver Ketteringham. Wilde and violinist Sarah Kemp were old school friends, while brothers Brendan (bass) and Adam Sykes (vocals, guitar) completed the interlinked lineup. Plying their trade in a D.I.Y. fashion and on a small budget, they borrowed an 8–track recorder and set about creating their first two releases, The Starlight EP (2009) and Misfortunes & Minor Victories (2010), capturing the intimacy that was afforded to them by recording in their own homes and an abandoned house in Northumberland. Flirting among the folk influences of Neil Young and the post–rock instrumental sounds of Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Low, the band’s sound swirled and unfolded gently into wonderful soundscapes. They released their records with handmade sleeves and organized a series of gigs in obscure places, such as a boat house on the Tyne River and the highest pub in Britain, the Tan Hill Inn, garnering the band a strong following. Although they received a recording budget after signing to Bella Union in the U.K., their 2011 debut album, Gracious Tide, Take Me Home, was recorded in a similar vein to their EPs. Various front rooms, bedrooms, and the basement of a Newcastle shop were overtaken to be their improvised studio spaces and there was no question of the band recording anywhere else. Gregory was at the helm of production duties, overseeing the escalating instrumentation, which featured guitars, violin, mandolin, piano, synths, and glockenspiels. He molded the record’s sound without veering too far from that of their EPs, highlighted by the re–recording of “If I’ve Been Unkind,” “I Love You Sleepyhead,” and “A Kingdom." Imagery of the sea and water resonated throughout the band’s work and this was further influenced by Wilde and Gregory’s relocation to the coast. Following the release of their debut, Lanterns on the Lake underwent a difficult period that culminated in brothers Brendan and Adam Sykes departing the band in 2012. The remaining members overcame this, alongside personal and financial difficulties, to release their sophomore record Until the Colours Run in 2013. The following year, Kemp left the group and Bob Allan officially joined on bass. Recorded in isolation in their Newcastle rehearsal space, and produced again by Gregory, the lusher but still despondent Beings followed in 2015. ~ Scott Kerr
Albums and EPs:
•    The Starlight EP (EP, 2008)
•    Misfortunes and Minor Victories (EP, 2009)
•    Gracious Tide, Take Me Home (LP, September 2011)[4]
•    Exclusive Rough Trade Bonus EP released with Gracious Tide, Take Me Home (EP, 2011)
•    Low Tide (Remix EP, April 2012)
•    Until The Colours Run (LP, October 2013)
•    “Beings” (LP, November 2015)
Singles:
•    “Lungs Quicken” (2010)
•    “Keep On Trying” (2011)
•    “Another Tale From Another English Town” (2013)
•    “Until The Colours Run” (2013)
•    “The Buffalo Days” (2013)
•    “Faultlines” (2015)
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Lanterns on the Lake — Beings (November 13, 2015)

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