Criterion Music

Darkness and doom-suffused songs set in an ambient landscape

This is a strange little record, all wrong turns and misdirection. A title or a sound tells you one thing, a tune or a lyric tells you the exact opposite. It opens with Boat Of Leaves, which you might think from the title is folky and pastoral, rather than the vengeful relationship splitter it actually is. ‘I’m gonna send you down the river/On a boat made of leaves/And I’ll watch you from the harbour/I’ll watch you as it sinks.’ Indeed. Things don’t get much better on the title track (‘I remember the time/when you and I/were better than this’), 1000 Miles (‘Hold her close and think of us’) or the real humdinger of a suicide ballad that is Angels.

All the arrangements and production are lush and languid (for which much credit must go to one ‘Fognode’), and create an ambient and relaxing landscape full of keyboards, synthesisers, loops and found sounds. This is in stark contrast to the lyrics, which drip into it like acid. A small ray of light is cast into Burson’s slough of despond by Let Me Lose Me, a song to a current lover, but even here there’s a hint of pleading and desperation, and one must wait until album closer Edge Of Town for the one unashamedly hopeful and bright song.

Very much a mood piece, the one discordant note on the album is sounded by a banjo-driven deconstructed cover of These Boots Were Made For Walking, which turns it into a gothic Deliverance-esque ballad. Not because it’s bad, far from it, but because it’s musically so different from what’s around it that it jars the ear and destroys the ambience.

Overall THIEVES is a refreshing work, haunting and thoughtful, and a welcome change from the serried ranks girls with guitars of the ‘have angst, will travel’ school. Jeremy Searle

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 11:32 am and is filed under reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.