Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 13/02/06
Label: Bella Union

Only three months in and already 2006 has been a terrific year for music. Alongside excellent albums by established favourites like Morrissey (his most rewarding, determinedly serious record for years), Belle & Sebastian, Mogwai and Isobel Campbell / Mark Lanegan, there's been a host of new bands to get over-excited about (from the Arctic Monkeys and The Long Blondes to The Research and Tilly And The Wall). And here's another gem to add to the year's embarrassment of riches.

A twentysomething five-piece from Glasgow, My Latest Novel first came to our attention with the soft folk pop of "The Hope Edition", a quietly beautiful blur of jangled guitars and wistful recorder melodies that instantly pegged them as successors to Belle & Sebastian. Catching the band live was an entirely different affair however - they opened with a brooding post-rock instrumental and then proceeded to lurch, waltz and glide between hints of the Arcade Fire, Sons And Daughters and The Delgados. Understandably, we were smitten.

"Wolves" brings all of the above together with staggering ease, the group propelled by their meticulously artful vision and reams of ambition. "Ghost In The Gutter" and "Pretty In A Panic" kick the album off with a sense that this is a band with things to be achieved. The songs build with an almost military pride, upping the tension and momentum with their eyes on the horizon, but then pull different stylistic handbrake turns - the former bursting into a group chant, the latter dropping back for a coda of spoken word.

There's a sense that My Latest Novel inhabit a childlike-world of their own imagining - somewhere between Narnia and Neverland - but they're never cloyingly twee or affectedly infantile. "When We Were Wolves" could be a Victorian parlour game - "and we ran and we hid…and we banged on our pianos" - but there's something reassuringly dark lurking here too. "Wrongfully, I Rested" also charts a curious semi-innocence, naïve and serious and fit to burst with where they could go next.

Lyrically, the band tend towards the oblique. Often you're not entirely sure what they're getting at, but as with the many sudden (yet elegantly performed) changes in direction and the dark Victorian childhood world they inhabit, it's clear that there's a definite logic at work here - all that's left for the listener to work it out. This may prove a stumbling block with albums to come, but right now joining the dots between the wordy twee pop of "The Job That Mr Kurtz Done" and the anthemic decay of "Learning Lego" is all part of the fun.

A truly stunning debut.

    by Ian Watson