From The Ground Up, by Shady Bard (CD on Static Caravan)

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From The Ground Up is the debut album from Birmingham’s Shady Bard, a mini indie-orchestra of pianos, guitars, casiotones, violin, cello, French horn and samples. Their music is at once passionate, eloquent, tender, bombastic and fragile, evocative of Coldplay, Mercury Rev, Sigur Ros and Sparklehorse. Singer Lawrence Becko, whose cracked tones contribute to the album’s bruised tone, writes using a special gift known as synaesthesia, which is the pairing of two or more senses. When Lawrence sees words, they appear as colours. “Synaesthesia shapes what we do in every way and makes me very obsessive,” he explains. “To me, every word and every chord have a colour and they all have to match up. So Penguins contains a lot of light blue, white and green colours to match with the imagery of ice and nature. Torch Song and Fires are rich yellows and oranges respectively to reflect their titles.”The album joins a loose group of ecologically themed albums that includes Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump, Pulp’s We Love Life and British Sea Power’s Open Season. Penguins, Bobby and Treeology all look at the consequences of environmental irresponsibility, Treeology telling the story of a tree surgeon who attempts to preserve an entire forest with creosote and varnish but kills the trees in the process. The nature-loving theme runs not just through the lyrics but through the band’s actions as well - they handed out birdseed to the public at one gig, band member Jasmine Hollingum makes craft from natural objects and they once performed in the Victorian bandstand at Birmingham’s botanical gardens.  But as much as nature, I think we're influenced by a bigger theme of how people deal with the world†around them - with climate, with living things, with the land, with each other,” they say. “We use environmental problems to say something about the wider picture - sometimes personally, sometimes politically.”

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