Midlake
The Courage of Others (Bella Union)

It’s tempting to feel a bit sorry for Midlake. After all, the Denton, Texas–based band has a lot to live up to. Namely, The Trials of Van Occupanther, its 2006 breakthrough album, which quietly built a buzz while forcing bloggers to dig into their parents’ LP collections for comparisons to Fleetwood Mac, America, CSN&Y, and, uh, Camel. In other words, Van Occupanther didn’t sound remotely like anything current, and its pastoral lyrical themes placed it even further outside the mainstream.

Three-and-a-half years later, Midlake is back with The Courage of Others, on which the general consensus seems to be that it’s something of a letdown. To be sure, the album is a sombre, almost grim affair, filled with slow, minor-key laments. On first listen, the songs don’t offer much variation, built as they all are around Tim Smith’s acoustic-guitar arpeggios and dispassionate singing.

It might be too much of a cliché to call it a grower, but The Courage of Others benefits greatly from close listening. Sure, the tracks all sort of sound alike on the surface, but it’s in the details that each comes alive. Witness how Fiona Brice’s distortion-strafed violin slashes through the sedate surface of “Winter Dies”, for example, or how Stephanie Dosen’s vocal harmonies add an aching melancholy to “Bring Down”. “Children of the Grounds” (which is a little reminiscent of Van Occupanther highlight “Roscoe”) kicks the tempo up a notch, while the title tracks fades out with fuzzed-out guitar doing battle with a lilting flute.

Smith has said the new album was created under the influence of ’60s Brit-folk revivalists like Fairport Convention and Pentangle. How much that inspiration coloured the final product is debatable. If there’s anything folky about the disc, though, it’s the lyrics. Concerning himself with the impact of humans upon their environment, Smith sometimes seems resigned to the fact that, basically, we’re all fucked. As he sings on opening cut “Acts of Man”, “And when the acts of men/Cause the ground to break open/Oh let me inside, let me inside not to wake.” He closes on a more hopeful note, however, with the final track, “In the Ground”: “After long winter’s gone/Seems that all is well, all is well.” So maybe we’re not all fucked after all.

Pitchfork didn’t care for The Courage of Others, but I have a feeling Al Gore would dig it.

Download This: “Children of the Grounds”