A Silent Film are a band I’ve touched base with a few times over the years. They didn’t register with me in 2005 with an unprepossessing Punt appearance, but last year’s ‘The Projectionist’ EP, a hushed, mysterious series of beautifully-arranged ballads, made me a convert. Their debut album, ‘The City that Sleeps’ updates their sound to the twenty-first century (‘The Projectionist’ often sounded as if it had been produced by Daniel Lanois circa 1987) and sounds formidably commercial, which may offend some Oxford hipsters. I like it immensely.
Two old songs have been re-recorded for the album. ‘Sleeping Pills’ was the highlight of ‘The Projectionist’, with its lovely marimba intro and a chorus that wasn’t so much singable as beltable. The new recording is inferior to the original as art (it’s more heckly, not as lush and the vocal performance isn’t as effortless), but it sounds more contemporary and is of a piece with the album as a whole. ‘Lamplight’, a daringly understated love song that managed to treat the hoary old subject as something new and strange, has had its chord sequence tweaked a bit, with the effect of rendering it more obvious, perhaps less interesting but catchier.
Far more interesting are the new songs, most of which are superb. ‘Thirteen Times the Strength’ has an epic, ecstatic freedom that I haven’t heard from the band before, especially in the chorus. It features many of the recurrent traits of the album: diamantine piano figures, syncopated drumming, spacey guitars and Robert Stevenson’s excellent vocals, which bear comparison with Peter Gabriel, Tom Chaplin and Chris Martin. Coldplay’s ‘Clocks’ may be conjured with, but ASF win that particular battle because their chorus-writing is stronger and the lyrics are sharper: Stevenson’s words aren’t particularly clear or poetic, but he has a knack for dramatic vignette:
‘I don’t ever want to see a face like that
So I left my clothes on the river bank
I don’t want to face you with a heavy head
I’ve taken my body to the river bed’
‘One Wrong Door’ is less melodically strong, but has a richness and sophistication which make it one for the connoisseurs. There is a simple bell-like melody at the start which is pure John Barry or Harry Nilsson, and the string parts, locked cleverly with the syncopated bass, provide added class.
My personal favourite is the gorgeous ‘Feather White’, largely due to its plangent multi-tracked chorus, sung by Stevenson with immense gravitas. Those who would turn music into train-spotting might cite minor steals from Muse and Keane, the former contributing the arpeggiated piano intro, the latter one or two vocal phrases in the verse. They might add Radiohead’s ‘The Bends’ for the nautical imagery. But then they should shut up. The song is mighty, beautiful and serious.
‘You Will Leave a Mark’ is a bit of an ASF rarity in that it actually rocks quite hard- this comes about due to the drummer largely giving the syncopations a break and pinging the tune along at a good lick with the emphasis on the two and the four. ‘Ghosts in the Water’ is icily attractive, fusing moments of Eric Satie, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Radiohead’s ‘Pyramid Song’ to produce a complex, sometimes dissonant work that baffles and excites in equal measure.
In sum, this album feels to me not far short of a masterpiece. In the discipline and care which the band have lavished on every one of the eleven songs (it has no dud tracks, although ‘Julie June’ is a little bland in places), the flawless playing, the evocative if elusive lyrics and Stevenson’s marvellous voice, they are excelled by no-one in Oxford and not many elsewhere in the country. Yes, many of the tracks are populist, yes they are influenced by bands who are not the acme of studied coolness and no, I don’t care and neither should you. ASF, like Pulp before them, will make the mainstream better. Buy the record.