Race Horses - Goodbye Falkenburg

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4...according to our Brian on Thu 28 Jan, 2010.

Race Horses are an odd bunch. Psych-glam britpop whimsy with a stuffed kingfisher adorning their album sleeve. They've definitely got something highly appealing about them but simultaneously do my nut in. I think it's that 'Cake' song that started it all. There's something archly wry about them, a bit like The Chap. I get a sense that they love The Kinks & Bowie but also worship outsider 90s bands such as The Auteurs. Fans of Lawrence from Felt's later projects may find something to love here, they've got a rich hazy radio pop sound nailed & their attention to detail is second to none. However, I suspect that they also wear ironic 2-tone y-fronts & collect old Bunty annuals & dreadful kitch rubbish from awful shops. I'd like them to prove me wrong. I thought there was something familiar about the vocalist's off-kilter falsetto style, Ant's just reminded me they're Welsh. so they're forgiven for being 70's revivalists then. All Welsh bands think it is still the fucking 70s, innit. ;0) 'Goodbye Falkenburg' is CD only on Fantastic Plastic

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TRACKLISTING:
01. Man In My Mind 02. Cake 03. Pony 04. Isle Of Ewe 05. Cacen Mamgu 06. Glo Ac Oren 07. Voyage To St Louiscious 08. Discopig 09. Man In My Mind (in at party near you) 10. Scooter 11. Intergalactic Space Rebellion 12. Captain Penelope Smith 13. Marged Wedi Blino

OVERVIEW:
Bet on Race Horses being your new favourite band in 2010. Having pulled off the enviable feat of producing a four-track, 7” concept EP Man In My Mind, they are now set to unleash their full-length, fully realised album, Goodbye Falkenberg, which is conceived as a collage of a salty old sailor’s life memories: “stories of good times and bad, of girls and champagne, of loneliness and longing.”

Bursting with ideas, zig-zagging between musical reference points from The Beatles to Suicide, this is an ambitious – and brilliant – debut, the place where Barbershop meets post-rock via folk, oompah, psychedelia and pop. “We felt bored with all modern music,” says singer Meilyr Jones. “We wanted to make our fifth album first, if you know what I mean.”

The album was recorded in a serious of adventurous sessions over the space of nine months with producer Dave Wrench (a member of Julian Cope’s Black Sheep, producer for Euros Childs and engineer for Bat for Lashes, James Yorkston, British Sea Power and Hot Chip) on board to reign in the chaos. “The Race Horses album was recorded in the oddest fashion I've ever experienced,” says Wrench. “We used nearly every technique dating back to the heyday of analogue recording. All in all, the most fun session I've ever had, and one of the very rare modern bands to be confident enough to never ever require any computer editing or trickery to make the record.”

Some tracks were recorded at parties, others in a deserted eco village named Cae Mabon (“a Smurf-esque fantasy-land Eco-paradise commune type thing,” in the words of guitarist Alun Gaffey), others in a chapel and many in Bethesda, Wales. Interspersing tracks are interludes taken from field recordings of nature or zoo animals or party guests, while string players from Meilyr’s course at the Royal Academy of Music and a choir of trainee dentists cap off the madness.

There’s more than music influencing this melee – the band cite directors Michel Gondry and Tim Burton, children’s classic Where The Wild Things Are and cheeky wartime comic George Formby as inspirations. The album’s nautical theme begins with its title: Falkenberg was a ship bombed in WWII, and also the name of a German sailor who died at sea. As the story goes, he returns to the shore every 100 years to search for a virgin to marry. Other themes, we are reliably informed, include mental illness, food, misfit couples and love. You mightn’t understand all of them, as a couple of tracks are sung in Welsh.

Comprising Meilyr Jones (vocals and bass), Dylan Hughes (keyboards, synths, guitar and vocal) Alun Gaffey (guitar and vocals) and Gwion Llewelyn (drums and vocals), Race Horses met in the sleepy Welsh town of Aberystwyth - a perfect place for psychedelic pondering. The band currently reside in Cardiff.