ARTIST: Fiel Garvie
TITLE: Caught Laughing
LABEL: Words On Music Records
GENRE: Indie
BITRATE: 201kbps avg
PLAYTIME: 0h 38m total
RELEASE DATE: 2006-08-00
RIP DATE: 2006-08-12
Track List
----------
1. Special Rate 3:18
2. Estimate 4:02
3. The Palace Lights 3:22
4. Daylight 3:23
5. Airsong 6:11
6. Shy Away 3:49
7. All Of You 5:17
8. Off And On Again 4:29
9. We Wish 4:57
Release Notes:
http://www.fielgarvie.co.uk/
http://www.myspace.com/fielgarvie
http://www.words-on-music.com/
Caught Laughing is the new record by the Norwich, England quintet Fiel Garvie,
and the band's second release for the Minneapolis-based Words On Music label.
The collective has released five singles, one EP, and three albums in the decade
since their formation in 1996.
Mixed by Geoff Allen (Camera Obscura, Teenage Fanclub, Belle & Sebastian,
Mogwai) Caught Laughing continues Fiel Garvie's reformation of pop music through
nine spellbinding new songs. Rather than abandoning the pop form altogether,
Fiel Garvie cunningly sidesteps its conventions with a distinctive flair and
ambience that does not cloud the quintet's fluency in melodies and hooks.
The album begins with the lullaby "Special Rate," whose string arrangements and
whispered vocals by Anne Reekie pronounce the band as an exquisite practitioner
of baroque chamber pop. Reekie's voice ù often cited by critics for her
poignant, unconventional delivery ù is likewise not simply a lyrical conduit,
but also a gateway to an enchanting, unfamiliar world of sound.
"The Palace Lights," the album's first single, is a deceptively jaunty tale of
seaside suicide, set to an insistent keyboard figure and borne along with the
sweetest melody, designed to inveigle itself into your consciousness and stay
there with a limpet-like sticking power.
Mid-tempo songs like "Estimate" and "Daylight" gracefully march alongside
American Analog Set and Yo La Tengo, while "Air Song," the album's epic
centerpiece, pulsates and loops in a manner that conjures up the work of
Stereolab.
"Dreaming is good because it outlasts us all," Reekie closes the album's second
track "Estimate," and the passage is an apt account of the impressions left by
this record. In Caught Laughing Fiel Garvie create an enduring, hallucinogenic
microcosmos inhabited by exotic, spherical keys, bashful peals of becalming
guitars, subterranean basslines, and columns of percussion that announce
themselves in sporadic, yet potent, intervals.
Caught Laughing launches Fiel Garvie into their second decade of delivering
idiosyncratic pop music, and unqualifiedly continues their tradition of
fearlessly flying their flag of independence.