Playlouder - Music is the Network

Something about North Sea Radio Orchestra doesn’t sound quite make sense. The fact is, English people aren’t meant to make music like this anymore: open, ambitious, breezy, bizarre and downright elegant.

It’s generally left to the Joanna Newsoms and Sufjan Stevenseses stateside to be this wilfully weird and individualistic within the constraints of likeable music that could be played on Radio 3 (or maybe even Radio 2!) The fact that North Sea Radio Orchestra are blowing their… various… woodwind instruments in a relatively lonely field makes them stand out all the more.

‘Birds’ is their second album, I think, and if you just caught a brief snippet, it could be mistaken for something a bit more Disney, a bit more trite, a bit more… well… Jaonna Newsom or Sufjan Stevens. Listen closely though, and you’ll feel a warmth that’s as weird as it is wholesome creeping through you.

Don’t get me wrong; they’re not absolute experimental conceptual nut jobs; their music has its feet firmly planted in various musical traditions of these (and no doubt other) isles, but the overall effect is almost otherworldly.  

‘The Angel’ introduces some first class harmonies and fingerpicking, suggestive of a fairly accomplished folk pop ensemble, but by the large scale choral gloriousness of ‘Move Eastward Happy Earth’ it seems North Sea Radio Orchestra are as much influenced by hymns sung in airy school assembly halls and nights at the opera as they are by the current scene (wherever/whatever that is). By ‘Now Welcom Somer’, as the album approaches its end, you’ll be concerned that you might wake up seven years older, with hazy memories of impossible colours, tastes and smells.

Wonderfully rich instrumentals like ‘Copt Gilders’ and ‘Harbour Wall’ would sound very filmic but for the fact that there’s perhaps too much going on for the music to be suitable as a backdrop – the melodies are played out over lush layers of strings, horns and subtle percussion, evoking a sense of Englishness which isn’t necessarily limited to the rural, despite the obvious associations of folk music, because of the closer proximity to classical arrangements over more obvious pop or folk forms. (Their MySpace amusingly locates them in London/Wessex.)

‘A poison Tree’, probably the most recognisable of three William Blake-inspired numbers present here, is a real delight, and much less wilfully sombre than the work of folks whom Blake usually tends to inspire (Sonne Hagal and Julian Cope are the ones that come to mind).

Indeed, the frequent levity of spirit could be something that limited ‘Birds’ somewhat, but this album is called ‘Birds’ isn’t it? And they’re not all turkeys and vultures. In fact, neither rear their ugly heads here, though the album does remain the right side of odd, and doesn’t let the evident ability of its various contributors get in the way of the grand scheme of things. Crucially, never does it sink into self-indulgence.

Sharron Fortnam’s voice is a powerful weapon here, too, and sparingly used; she could sing you a bad-news bus timetable while you were stranded in a hailstorm and it wouldn’t piss you off.

God knows how it manages to sound so contemporary, but somehow it pushes it. Perhaps it’s the twists and turns in Craig Fortnam’s expert guitar-lines, which betray a playful penchant for prog, or perhaps it’s just that – as I’ve mentioned once or twice – nobody else around here really sounds like North Sea Radio Orchestra: if they’d been doing this in the 60s you can bet a lot more people would be doing it now.