Guillemots - Walk the River

Review by Lisa Dib

UK indie-rock band Guillemots opens their third album with what, in hindsight, turns out to be the best track on their new LP: Walk the River, the echoic title number, brings to mind Yeasayer’s best and most ethereal work.

The heartrending vocals of front-man Fyfe Dangerfield burn lyrics like: “Walk the river…like a hunted animal” with profound emotional intensity, and one gets the feeling the entire album will be a cakewalk, bursting at the seams with ghostly, sprawling beats from space and beyond.

Looking back…it kinda doesn’t. Wait, don’t go: let me explain.

Walk the River, the album, is at all times beautiful and sad. Vermillion’s sparse instrumentation is divine, I Don’t Feel Amazing Now (“Just take my hand and make me glad I'm changing”) sounds a bit like something Keane would release (which sounds like a slur but is not) and Ice Room’s quicker, more upbeat- while keeping a melancholy root: “Oh I'm so alive, I'm so alive/ but I can't stop the tears from falling down”- fuzz of thick bass and papery guitar strings is sumptuous.

But Guillemots forget themselves; wandering through the largely forgettable nine-minute-sixteen Sometimes I Remember Wrong becomes painfully meandering when I forget it is even playing at times.

The plodding drumbeats coupled with Dangerfield’s usually glorious vocals set to “beige” become leaden; Tigers is fairly unremarkable but for the heart-breaking lyric: “Home isn't anywhere we ever are”; Inside opens with promising creepy semi-industrial sounds but, aside from a neato falling synth sound, doesn’t hit the mark.

I Must Be A Lover utilizes the tried-and-true upbeat handclap beat, making the track sound like the coming-of-age ending song to a Zach Braff indie quirk film where the manic-pixie dream girl finally decides to let go of her childhood neuroses/ daddy issues/ addiction to Vicodin and get together with the oddly handsome male lead with flopsy hair. I can’t decide if this is a commendation or not.

With single The Basket, we are back to the spacey, jittery, arms-in-the-air dancer tracks and Dangerfield’s heartening lyricism: “Conversations/ How we run into the cellar door/ Yeah, I'm a backstroke swimmer for sure”, melded with the odd falsetto vocal. Dancing in the Devil’s Shoes brings to mind Don McLean’s vocal sensitivity and purity: a slow-burner with vocal ‘ooohs’ in background, it’s tender as a tulip and just as sweet. Nyaw.

The rekkid ends with Yesterday is Dead, a disappointing bookend. This number seems very typical of the genre and doesn’t hold the kind of gorgeousness and gorgeousity I needed; it’s certainly nothing as stunning as parts of the rest of the album.

Though I may sound critical of the album, it’s a fairly exquisite effort from the band and, if you’re anything like me (which, hopefully, you are not, because it means you just had a can of Coke for breakfast and listen to an absurd amount of Journey), you’ll have the opening track in your head and heart for days. 

RATING: 4 out of 5