What do you do when you are no longer new, the minds have been made up, and the die cast?
Well, maybe you should just be yourself...?'
Wide-Eyed Nowhere is Turin Brakes’ ninth full studio album, a set of new songs emerging 21 years after their seminal debut (which was reissued last year, and flew to the top spot of the Indie Album Chart).
It's no easy feat maintaining an optimistic attitude through the turbulence of the years, but the band found their own method down in deepest Tooting to produce this lean, bittersweet collection.
The South London 4-Piece comprising Olly Knights, Gale Paridjanian, Rob Allum and Eddie Myer recorded this new set of songs at Twin Palms - Olly's garden studio - over the summer of 2021, choosing to let time infuse into the music and mature in a way it couldn’t in a pressurised commercial studio setting.
Olly: 'We surprised ourselves with what came out; a sweeter, groovier set of songs in no hurry to be anything but themselves….Friends would visit, kids would add a voice or two, bees would buzz and we’d get to sit in the South London sun while the music poured out of the speakers and floated across the lawn. Sometimes we decided it’s okay to just let it happen naturally, not to try too hard - just get out of the way let the songs take shape, and that maybe you don’t have to be in a bad place to make the deeper cuts.'
Tracklist
Thematically the songs on Wide-Eyed Nowhere – all written before the pandemic - veer from the bliss of a new found inner peace to the poetry of despair; when mid-life relationships lose their heading and the world seems to be spinning ever faster towards the sinister
Olly: 'For some reason we tend to set the music in contrast to what’s being sung about in the lyric, it’s often intriguing this way and sets up a beautiful tension. Rob likes to call it the iron fist in a velvet glove. I guess I just like the way it mirrors how I see existence, it feels honest and a little comical to me. There’s a very secret smile I feel when I recognise a truth of the human condition in things, and that’s all I’m trying to get to when writing these songs. I figure some other folks might get that same feeling from them’.
With the classic Turin Brakes palette of warm voiced acoustic guitars laid over super-tight full-fat grooves, laced with layers of subtle sonic detail and direct, impassioned vocals, Wide-Eyed Nowhere creates a sound that’s rooted in the past but totally of the present, and takes you to a place that’s timeless.
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