My enthusiasm has slowly grown for Emma Pollock’s solo record, first reviewed here a couple months ago. I’ve found myself listening to it a lot more than I expected, including twice today. Thinking about that reminded me that I needed to post on another band in the running for best post-Delgados record of 2007: Great Northern (named, I can only assume, after the hotel in Twin Peaks). Cascading piano-guitar numbers, ethereal female vocals, epic progressions…you know the drill.
Just A Dream – Great Northern
The record is called Trading Twilight for Daylight, and it’s a very solid effort. They do occasionally overstep a bit and wander into the land of the overwrought, but for the most part they keep themselves on the right side of Coldplay. And a few tracks seem like half-finished ideas stretched desperately thin to make a four-minute song (“Home,” the plodding “City of Sleep,” and the unnecessarily long outro for “Low Is a Height,” for example). But on the whole, they deliver.
I’ve read a couple reviews of Trading Twilight for Daylight which called it overproduced. And while that criticism is fair, I don’t think it’s quite right. There’s not too much production – it’s just not always done with the right touch. Which leads me to my concluding thought: a potentially unfair frustration…
See, this is the type of record I was hoping Stars would make. Atmospheric, shimmering, epic, heart-on-sleeve dreamy pop. Which leaves me with a vague sense of loss on two counts, because not only was I unhappy with the record Stars actually produced, I’m also left to wonder what this material could have sounded like in the hands of pop-geniuses like Torquil and Amy.
The end result is two very enjoyable albums that still somehow can’t quite satisfy me.