Radio 2: Radcliffe & Maconie – live session 12th Jan
6Music: Playlisted ‘Trouble In Mind’ / Marc Riley session
Uncut ‘Debut album of the month’ 4/5
Mojo Page feature ‘Tip For 2010’ & 4/5 Album review
The Times – ‘Tip For 2010’
Q 4/5 album review ‘Stunning debut from Simon Tong’s nu folk trio’
BBC Scotland playlist..Jim Gellatly's 10 bands for 2010
You can catch Erland And The Carnival on the following dates around the UK
January 2010
25 in-store @ Rough Trade East London
26 in-store @ Resident Brighton
February 2010
15 Glasgow Captains Rest
16 Nottingham Rescue Rooms
17 Manchester The Deaf Institute
18 London Old Blue Last
19 Birmingham Glee Club
20 Bristol Stop The Bus
Erland Cooper, guitarist, singer and former resident of remote Orkney. The Carnival are guitarist Simon Tong (The Verve, The Good, The Bad, The Queen) and drummer/engineer David Nock (engineer on Paul McCartney’s The Fireman). Together, they make a pastoral, psychedelic sound described by Tong as “Pentangle meets Ennio Morricone meets Love meets 13th Floor Elevators meets Joe Meek.” In other words: folk-tinged, psyched up, fuzzed-out brilliance.
Their self-titled debut album was recorded at Studio 13 (owned by Tong’s The Good, The Bad, The Queen band mate Damon Albarn), overdubbed in Simon’s attic and Erland’s shed and mixed at the garden studio owned by renowned producer Youth. Keys/harmonium player Andy Bruce, vocalist Georgia Sands and bassist Danny Wheeler also appear.
Sounding quite unlike any other album released this year, this astonishing record finds the band plundering all kind of literary and musical sources. In the grand folk tradition, The Carnival see source material as something to be adapted, tinkered with, updated and blown apart.
Opening track 'Love Is A Killing Thing' is a based on a traditional folk song collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams but updated with a new bridge and a chorus from a Seeger/MacColl song. The Derby Ram is another traditional song but greatly overhauled from its original subject matter. Originally about a giant fictional sheep, it now details a true (and truly modern) story about a recent suicide in which the jumper was filmed on mobile phones by the crowd on the ground. Elsewhere, William Blake ('The Echoing Green') and Leonard Cohen ('Disturbed In The Morning') provide the words.
Resolving to form a band, Nock, Tong and Cooper took their name from Jackson C Frank’s My Name Is Carnival, a cover of which appears on the album. The band’s progression since has been fairly unorthodox: they’ve played gigs at miniature railway stations and their debut EP was individually re-recorded for each of its limited run, meaning no two copies are the same. All the while, they’ve been developing that bewitching sound.
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fucking great band
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