Turin Brakes

Ether Song, Source

Having narrowly avoided supping from the poisoned chalice that is the Mercury Music Prize, Turin Brakes have also made a swift getaway from the potentially stifling "new acoustic movement" with this follow-up to their first album, The Optimist LP. Recorded in Los Angeles with the Beck/Air producer Tony Hoffer, Ether Song exhibits a more confident command of their resources and a substantially increased instrumental palette than before. The songs might still be based on the acoustic guitars of Brakes duo Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian, but they're emboldened here with a superstructure of bass, drums and keyboards that allows them to bloom in new and unusual ways. With Knights's tenor croon recalling late-period Tim Buckley, the results can be dramatic – and occasionally overworked, as when the intimate verses of "Long Distance" are supplanted by a chorus swollen with splashy cymbals, wracked guitar and declamatory piano, rather in the manner of Starsailor. The best tracks are "Full of Stars", about the act of remembering the dead ("It's the demons who drag you down/ But the angels pull you up"), and "Panic Attack", whose stilted, staccato presentation evokes the jagged emotional state in which "the smallest thing could strip you to your skin". But when the melodies start borrowing from classic-rock chestnuts such as "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and – whisper it quietly – "Freebird", as in "Stone Thrown" and "Self Help" respectively, it's perhaps time for Olly and Gale to start broadening their record collections as well as their instrumentation.