Dray & the Tallows — Second Sleep

The good record is in there in pieces, in an order somebody outside the band would have to decide.

What surrounds it is not bad, and that is the problem — nothing here is bad enough to have been cut by anyone who liked it.

This is not a complaint about indulgence. Dray & the Tallows are not an indulgent band — there are no eleven-minute passages here, no ambient interludes, nothing that announces itself as a statement. The problem is subtler and more common: eleven songs that are all somewhere between good and fine, sequenced in the order they were finished, with nothing removed because nothing was obviously bad.

Here is the record with the case laid out against it.

Six songs, thirty-two minutes, and a record that would be the best thing they have done.

What is frustrating is that the band clearly know how to do this. `The Mend` is a masterclass in leaving early — it stops about eight bars before you expect it to and the effect is that you play it again. `Cold Frame` earns six and a half minutes by actually going somewhere, which the other long tracks do not. Somebody in that room understands editing perfectly well and was overruled, or did not push, or ran out of energy at the point where you have to tell four people who have worked for two years that a third of it is going.

The reprise is the tell. A reprise is what a band puts on a record when it has decided the record is a Statement, and Second Sleep is not a statement, it is eleven songs.

There is a very good record in here and the band have declined to find it.

How we hear a record now — The Merch Table

Nobody sits down with a record any more, including us, including the people who make them. An argument about what that has done to the second side.

The Merch TableNadia Vresk