Stornoway - Beachcomber’s Windowsill

The PR bumf for this album confidently states that ‘Beachcomber’s Windowsill’ has taken Stornoway five years to make and includes over a hundred instruments, and it shows – but perhaps not in the way that these incongruously-named Oxford folksters would want it to. A well-thought out, eclectic album is one thing, but when it’s too full? That’s when it starts to get a bit difficult to call it an album at all.

That’s not to say it’s actively irritating, but there’s no cohesion, a through line to carry you along throughout. Over the course of those five years, Stornoway seem have listened to a lot of artists they liked and experimented with their differing styles, but have never settled on a sound for themselves. As such, we’re left with an album packed with homage and mimicry, ranging from the good-natured pop stomp of Belle & Sebastian of recent single ‘I Saw You Blink’, a Laura Marling lament in the shape of ‘The End of the Movie’ and ‘Boats and Trains’, which seems to borrow its intro and overall tone directly from two-hit wonder Aqualung’s ‘Strange and Beautiful’.

In fact, the best song, ‘We Are The Battery Human’, doesn’t sound like anyone else but rather draws on generic standards and twist them into new shapes - taking a bluegrass banjo base and adding twinkling electric guitar and lyrical content that this writer is convinced is a big, winking reference to The Matrix. It’s a simple but incredibly likeable song left sitting directly in the middle of the album, and that makes you wish that what you’ve already heard had been like this and what comes after a little more disappointing.

That’s the overall problem with the album, it’s not downright bad, it’s just disappointing. To play over a hundred instruments, this must be a talented group of musicians, but as songwriters they don’t quite live up to the talent they possess elsewhere.