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LAST HARBOUR

“Hold Fast, Pioneer “

(Tongue Master)

I really dig this band. After two mesmerizing releases on the troubled (and now defunct) Alice-In-Wonder label, it’s great to see a new album (on a new label) from this group of talented folks! First off, it will help if you have a taste for the Tindersticks / Nick Cave / Scott Walker / Black Heart Procession end of the vocal spectrum. That said, Last Harbour have their own sound. They exist in their own realm, dishing out potent, sinister ballads in minor key fashion. KEVIN CRAIG croons pure poison mist from the speakers, and I mean this in the best possible way. Piano and strings add heft, but none of it comes off as overblown or pompous. They might straddle that line, but never cross it. For the uninitiated, Last Harbour might be swimming too far into the deep end of melancholia. For the rest of us that can handle soul bearing of this poignancy… Light the candles and draw the blinds, let’s wallow! (www.tonguemaster.co.uk)

- MICHAEL PEARLSTEIN

- TIM PEACOCK  www.whisperinandhollerin.com

LAST HARBOUR

" Hold Fast, Pioneer "

(Tongue Master)

Cello-laden, minor-key balladry from the Manchester quintet, tipping a trilby to Nick Cave, Tom Waits and the Tindersticks.

LAST HARBOUR

" Hold Fast, Pioneer " - 4.5 / 5

(Tongue Master)

There's a school of thought that suggests that Tindersticks singer and Vic Reeves' pub singer persona are one and the same. And for a few, this makes the 'sticks beautiful prog-flamenco epics unlistenable. For this small minority, Last Harbour may have the answer. From the lolloping cowpoke rhythms on opener 'China White' through to almost painfully slow-moving 'The Ties That Bind' that closes this set, we have a collection of heartstring-tugging croons set atop either lushly-orchestrated set-pieces or almost Calvanistically-frugal semi-acoustic backings. In the main, it's a mini string section which provides the backing and recalls the violin work of Long Fin Killie - another plus point.
To be fair, the comparisons to Stuart Staples and co don't apply to every track here by any means - 'We Always Said'... "we'd be better off dead"' - is a sweet duet closer to Low in delivery, but with the same dark themes. Indeed a more accurate comparison might be Is This Music's? doom-country faves Puerto Muerto, while there's something of Nick Cave in the native rhythms on 'Johnny Row'. But no matter the invidious comparisons, Last Harbour is well worth the visit.

- STUART McHUGH

LAST HARBOUR

" Hold Fast, Pioneer " - 7/10

(Tongue Master)

Taking the traditional folk ensemble and injecting it with a much-needed contemporary twist, Last Harbour come across like the progeny of Nick Cave and The Tindersticks. This means they indulge in plenty of bleak, melancholy laments but these are accompanied by soaring violin and driving acoustics that somehow make ' Hold Fast, Pioneer ' fresh & utterly compelling. The spirit of Tom Waits is evoked in the slurred and mumbling ' Circle ', which rides high with drunken, swaying piano and bursts of sparkling mandolin. ' His Cold Hand ' recalls even darker, murkier soundscapes, heavily redolent of something that could be heard at your nearest art-cinema joint. ' Serpents ', meanwhile, has a slightly quicker, stronger feel; stomping its militant feet and carrying the band, weary but determined, towards the album's conclusion. It's sinister stuff, but well worth hearing for its grace and morbid beauty.

- AMY MCGILL

" Hold Fast, Pioneer "
(Tongue Master)

Darkly haunting and cinematic second album from Mancurian group Last Harbour with an affinity for fire and brimstone religious imagery

This world is so unkind/bitter and beautiful/sinister and dutiful" vocalist Kevin Craig concludes towards the end of the elegiac 'The Ties That Bind', the twelfth and final track on his band Last Harbour's latest album. 'Hold Fast Pioneer'. It could in many ways serve as a summary of the record itself.

The rustic 'Hold Fast Pioneer' is tinged with haunting, cinematic atmospherics and sometimes harsh, but always melodic arrangements. As its front cover of a stark Eastern European landscape in midwinter, however, suggests, the subject matter of this album for all its beauty is bleak. Unrequited love, adultery, sin and betrayal are its main themes, and, like Sixteen Horsepower and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, with whom Last Harbour share a similar affinity for fire and brimstone religious imagery, the apocalypse never seems far away.

A Manchester-based consortium, Last Harbour first formed in 1998, and released their debut EP, a four song 7", 'Hidden Songs' on local label Liquefaction in early 2000. They followed this with a five song mini album, 'An Empty Box is My Heart' in 2001 and their debut full-length album 'The Host of Wild Creatures' in 2002. Both of these came out on the French label Alice in Wonder. 'Hold Fast, Pioneer' has been released on London-based label, Tongue Master Records.

While Last Harbour's pivotal members have always been Craig and David Armes (guitar, bass), the band's line-up stabilised at the time of 'The Host of Wild Creatures' to also include Gina Murphy (piano, vocals, melodica, organ), Sarah Kemp (violin, banjo) and Huw McPherson (drums, percussion). Craig's burly, baritone vocals; Armes' orderly acoustic guitar pluckings ; Murphy's wonky, slightly askew piano work ; Kemp's seesawing, Slavic-influenced violin and McPherson's clattering drum work plus icy, occasionally discordant pedal steel on several tracks from special guest James Youngjohns (who also plays with Kemp in local alt.country act Anna Kashfi) all solder together to make 'Hold Fast, Pioneer' an unsettling experience.

The opening track 'China White' melds tinkles of piano and gently tilting violin with slowly rattling, funereal slabs of drums, and finds the gravel-voiced Craig, "his heart sent to flame" becoming absorbed by the china white skin of a girl he meets in a dark bar. As he becomes increasingly and much to his own fear fixated, he finds, however, that her skin, far from being unblemished, instead is covered with "holes and the scars and cuts and the bruises", a mantra which he obsessively and with horror repeats to himself over and over as the song ends. In an ambiguous twist, one is left uncertain at the conclusion of 'China White' whether the girl's bruises are possibly stigmata marks, or if it is something that she has done to herself, or Craig has done to her because she has rejected him.

It is a chilling start, one which is heightened as one doesn't really know what has happened, but much of the rest of the album proves to be similarly unnerving. 'Corrosives' opens with scrapings of loops and Armes gently twitching his guitar before swelling gradually upwards to become an Eastern European-flavoured orchestral light waltz. Craig plays the role of a preacher returning to his home town after a long absence, but as he sings "this town is full of hate and ire/this town is petty and bitter and jealous/it is heavy in heart and vicious/I hope that you are ready for a town on fire" one realises that, far from returning to try to save it, he has come to take vengeance on it and to destroy it.

Breezy country gig 'Your Verses' features a sneering Gina Murphy taking a rare turn on vocals and playing the role of a woman scorned who seeks revenge on her former lover by destroying the songs he has written for his new love. The morose and sinister 'Johnny Row' has Craig bouncing melancholic vocals against a harpy-like ten-piece choir, and finds its central protagonist, along with the other occupants of a doomed ship, trying to "scourge temptation" but ending up damned regardless. The shimmering 'The Ties That Bind' meanwhile brings the album to a soft, beguiling close and has a weary Craig, knowing that there is nothing fair about what he is doing, breaking up with his lover and suggesting to her that she takes her chances with God for comfort.

Often disturbing, but equally so compelling, 'Hold Fast, Pioneer' is undoubtedly a very dark work, but combines this with a set of lusciously majestic and sublime musical landscapes. A more bittersweet album is unlikely to be released this year.

- JOHN CLARKSON www.pennyblackmusic.com

Clearly the unwelcome gap between recording and releasing new material has done Last Harbour some good creatively. Whereas its predecessor was slightly indicative of self-exploratory growing pains, that occasionally over-flavoured the melting pot, 'Hold Fast, Pioneer' features a far more ambitious yet leaner approach. By focusing more on their basic song structures the band are now better at giving each track its own identity. Allowing the versatile instrumental embellishments to add texture, not showy distractions, to the core ideas. It's a subtle self-instructive twist that makes the album stronger right from the start, and what a start it is. Over a glistening piano line, woozy violin, diligent guitar-picking and wonderfully inventive drumming, Kevin Craig's characteristic baritone turns into a comforting croon on the gorgeous opening China White, fashioning in the process, the best song The Crime & City Solution never got to write. Having such a high bar set so early on, certainly gives the band a challenge to rise to, throughout the remaining minutes of the album. But rise they do, with both grace and grit.

The slowly churning Corrosives is notably effective, gliding from a tiny intimate arrangement to a grand Dirty Three-like drama, with Sarah Kemp's violin wrapping a suitably stirring twine around Gina Murphy's plaintive keyboards and Craig's omnipresent vocal. The more grandiose Johnny Row takes things to a more epic level, with its brute choir assemblage recalling Nick Cave's 'The Good Son' to entertaining effect. But knowing when to peel things back again is a tactic carefully used elsewhere, the skeletal piano-led ballad Serpents being a shining example. A couple of things don't work, like Craig's employment of the singing-through-an-amp manoeuvre on Circle or the wobbly Russian folk tune rhythm on the Murphy-sung Your Verses, but generally this an album built carefully around resourcefulness, restraint and perhaps for the first time, unbridled romance. Something that makes the gently ebbing The Ties That Bind such a fine bookend to the album, in almost the same way that the Tindersticks gave their eponymous second album such a blissful send-off with the sublime Sleepy Song. Although the song's trailing last lyric is the despondent "This world can be so unkind..." it sounds as if the band want to seek some genuine uplift to make it ain't so. Something at least this listener wants the band to reach for next time around, which will hopefully be a lot sooner than the usual later. Until then though, this thoughtfully evocative collection will do just fine.

- ADRIAN PANNETT

LAST HARBOUR

Manchester collective Last Harbour follow a romantic muse that should appeal to fans of Tindersticks' mumble and Nick Cave's dark heart. "There are a lot of love songs in there," confides singer Kevin Craig, "but the romance isn't necessarily between two people. It's with God and boats too!" One such tale is the doomed narrative of 'Johnny Row', a highlight of their new album for Tongue Master 'Hold Fast, Pioneer.' "The ship's fucked and everybody's throwing themselves overboard. He's back to tell people that this terrible thing has happened. We try to evoke a story through the atmosphere of the music, and I like to think the lyrics just help nudge the listener into that atmosphere." The name Last Harbour was chosen by guitarist, David Armes, from a song by one of his favourite bands American Music Club. "I wanted something that reminded me of the David Lynch film "Lost Highway" which is quite a romantic and sensual film, apart from the moments of violence and horror. It had that slightly refugee spirit that we were looking for. In Ireland there's a port called Last Harbour. It's the westernmost port from where all the immigrants left for America. Across this great expanse of ocean these people were trying to get somewhere better than the place they were." The only way to present their filmic rock in an appropriate atmosphere is to organise gigs themselves. So, Last Harbour invite like minded groups to play with them in Manchester at their "People Forget the Small Things" night at the Kings Arms, Salford. The next one, on Friday March the 4th, will feature Saint Joan of Nottingham who will also be touring Britain with them.
The album is released on February 21st on Tongue Master,

- BILLY HELL