Send "Guillemots " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Guardian |
 Guillemots followed their brilliantly antic and Mercury-nominated debut, Through the Windowpane, with the altogether blander Red in 2008. Happily, Walk the River resuscitates much of the extravagance and euphoria of that first album. Their jangly pop can tilt into ad-friendly, empty effervescence (single "The Basket", for example, certainly doesn't do the album justice), but there are also plenty of more sophisticated tracks; a touch of heartache and bitterness seems to have done them good. Reprising the bitter "play on, play on" lyric of the LP's second track, "Vermillion", the standout is the desperately poignant "Dancing in the Devil's Shoes", where Fyfe Dangerfield's plangent vocals soar against restrained instrumentation....full text |
| Morethanthemusic |
| Having wooed the nation with his cover of Billy Joel’s She’s Always a Woman for most of last year, Fyfe Dangerfield has returned to his band Guillemots with a new sense of purpose. With the band having gone AWOL since 2008, they’ve been working hard to produce this twelve track album. It’s fair to say everyone has their bad days, but the lyrics in I Don’t Feel Amazing Now are particularly poignant. “Take my heart it’ll make me feel amazing” sings Dangerfield as he establishes that he’s given everything he can to the audience of the song. The instrumental melody towards the end of the track makes you want to sing along and the repetition creates the perfect formula for a radio-friendly track. First single, The Basket, is already getting radio play and deservedly so. There’s an electronic feel to the song as vocals are layered beneath Dangerfield’s voice. As one of the more upbeat and, as it happens high-pitched, tracks from the album it’s definitely one that’s been chosen to appeal to the masses and I see no reason why it won’t. Whilst not quite challenging Meatloaf’s Bat out of Hell, the band’s Sometimes I Remember Wrong is a lengthy track. At just over nine minutes long it seems a bit too much like background music for me to enjoy as one well-formed song. Yesterday Is Dead is another long track, but the repetition of the chorus works in its favour to maintain the structure in a song that builds momentum as it progresses – up until the last awkward minute of instrumental anyway. It’s in the shorter and more heartfelt Dancing in the Devil’s Shoes that I rediscover Dangerfield’s vocals that I first fell for in the John Lewis adverts. With guitar and drums adding character to the song his vocals hold their own and the chorus still feels raw....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| In a recent video, Guillemots lead singer Fyfe Dangerfield and drummer Greig Stewart play live "in a little woodland, by a disused railway line" in north London. Wrens and robins chirp. Standing against a graffiti-emblazoned gray brick wall, the scruffily bearded Dangerfield strums an acoustic guitar casually, almost haphazardly. Stewart, wearing a pair of white-rimmed shades you might see on one of Biff's henchmen in Back to the Future, runs his drumstick along the bars of an iron gate-- gently, almost tenderly. Dangerfield's formidable falsetto soars through the space's cavernous reverb, dexterously communicating heartache. If you're in the right mood, it can be powerful stuff: an affecting mix of traditional earnestness and experimental impulses. This uneasy balance between balladeer sentimentality and avant-garde adventurousness runs through the Guillemots' discography. On 2006 debut Through the Windowpane, which earned the four-piece a Mercury Music Prize nomination, these competing urges resolved themselves gloriously in songs like fragile opener "Little Bear", romantic ode "Made-Up Lovesong #43", and northern soul shimmy "Trains to Brazil". But 2008's Red meandered through ambitious yet unremarkable Britpop. And Dangerfield's 2009 solo nod, Fly Yellow Moon, suggested the band's schmaltzy side had conquered all. Never mind that Billy Joel cover: Walk the River shows Guillemots still have a few eccentricities up their sleeves, though they remain a long way from their mid-2000s peak. Guillemots' third album is mournful, lushly arranged, and conflicted as ever about whether it wants to be singer-songwriter comfort food or forward-thinking pop. The song from the video, "I Don't Feel Amazing Now", feels overdone, muddling its unspectacular, melancholy lyrics with the full studio gamut of strings and choral backing vocals. But first single "The Basket" is a lot more effective, simultaneously a cryptic love song ("You knock me over/ Come on and do it again") and a propulsive, kaleidoscopic assault on a culture where there's "a masterpiece that no one bothered painting/ Everybody's too busy with those baskets of theirs." Think of a grown-up Supergrass (there's theremin). The ominously ornamented title track is a sample-ready testament of survival, while the electronic sunshine of "I Must Be a Lover" offers a needed break from all the gloom....full text |
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