It seems like a lifetime ago since My Latest Novel’s gorgeous debut Wolves arrived. It was, still is, a wonderful album that created a curious, endlessly shifting and engaging world of its own. Several live shows, including a stunning short set at the Reading Rooms in Dundee, highlighting songs off the ‘soon to be released’ second album in early 2007 seemed to confirm the sense of something special to follow then little else was heard from the Greenock band. Beyond the odd live performance or rumour of the albums final completion, My Latest Novel seemed to disappear from view. Perhaps they had turned feral, like the wolves of the albums title track they could be found running around the hills, skulking in darkened caves and rooms, lost in a wilderness of their own making as they attempted to live up to the potential of that almost perfect debut.
Deaths And Entrances is a difficult album to describe. It still retains the core of My Latest Novel’s distinctive sound, the mix of delicate inventiveness and coruscating noise. It takes a good few plays to reveal itself to your ears, dragging you in just a little bit at a time before delivering a series of killer blows rather than just teasing sucker punches. And what a punch this dark, bruised epic of an album packs, leaving me in the gutter gazing at the stars in a state of bewilderment and breathless joy.
Opening song, ‘All In All In All Is All’ is sumptuous, layers of instruments and Chris Deveney’s distinctive, battered voice and gorgeous vocal harmonies combining to form a wonderful, soaring, surging song that is equal parts wistful and defiant, delicate and thundering before melding into a lovely climax. ‘Dragonhide’ is full of stark, disturbing images married to an elegant twisting tune, switching from a fragile sound built upon the foundations of guitar, cello, piano and drums and a resigned, forlorn vocal, full of anxiety and pain, sounding close to the edge:
Forget what I said
Watch what I do
In my head
My hands on your throat.
This vengeful song ebbs and flows before building into an epic, stormy ending with Deveney singing ‘There’s no telling what I could do’. It’s creepy and beguiling. ‘Lacklustre’ has a lighter feel with its clever, strange arrangement mixing a dual sense of enclosure with the sense of wide open spaces with the songs protagonist ‘running through alleyways and boulevards to escape the sea’. Both the lyrics and the instruments give the song a strong elemental feel which is both effective and affecting.
‘I Declare A Ceasefire’ is, for me, the centrepiece of Deaths And Entrances. An awesome, powerful force of a song. It has the simplest of introductions, just guitar, effects and voice combining deliciously, gradually building up in subtle layers, at times beautiful, at others ferocious but at all times elegant. It’s hard to tell if the war is one in the wider world, something totally personal or both but My Latest Novel come out fighting with lines like
And if anything’s so stupid
It’s to turn and walk away
Declare this is over
And run, run, run, run
Remember that these arrows
Are only sticks and sharpened stones
They can be collected
As far from here as they go.
‘A Dear Green Place’ is another truly beautiful song, alternating between shades of light and darkness with a gorgeous melody, angelic backing vocals and a stunning vocal full of images, visions of dreams lost where ‘my nightmares are entrances wholly enclosed’. Like Archie Hinds character in his 1966 novel, The Dear Green Place, Mat Craig, the attempts to create a world of art, dreams and aspirations are thwarted by being forced to take a place in an enclosed, proscribed life. ‘Argument Against The Man’ carries on the metaphors and images of war of some of the previous songs. It’s a raw, enervating, furious song segueing into the short but equally angry instrumental, ‘Man Against The Argument’ where, it seems, the man has no coherent response.
‘If The Accident Will’ has a haunting, disconnected feel. Beginning with just a guitar and voice singing ‘Just when the war began / You left my side’ the melancholy, battered introduction switches into a lovely, curious arrangement with the percussion pattering between speaker channels then into a fantastic scratchy riff culminating in another stunning song full of regret and defiance. On this song My Latest Novel develop a specific stance:
I deserted my flat
I deserted my country
This isn’t my war
This fight isn’t right
There’s no hidden plot
Its just when the war began
I thought that dead is dead.
It’s a haunting song with a cyclical feel, very personal but fully aware of the wider world, of the lies and deceptions, of cruelty and cynical decision making and the need to make firm choices in a world where nothing is black and white but there is a real choice between right and wrong. If that makes the song sound in anyway po-faced, I’m sorry, nothing could be more wrong as this is a complex, energizing song, full of passion and difficult emotions.
‘Hopelessly Endlessly’ has an amazing, atmospheric introduction, lulling you in before swelling and soaring into an ocean of heart-stopping, beautiful currents and flows, buffeting you around in an emotional whirlpool. It possesses a heartbreakingly melancholy aura, a simple refrain building into an expansive, blistering crescendo of different voices and instruments, all combining to devastating effect before a calm, funereal ending. ‘Re-Appropriation Of The Meme’ also begins with a calm solitary piano and a different lead vocalist singing of how “In words the language spoke / In music strings were broke’ before a brass interlude and thunderous drums break through the initial calm, still feeling. ‘The Greatest Shakedown’ has a mournful, regretful feel, the male and female vocals combining with an accordion as the song slowly builds up into a raucous climax. For all the talk of war the first battleground is always personal relationships:
Honey, I’ve got some thinking to do
Because this can only be me
And this can only be you.
A bleakly, pretty song, it’s sparse and wintry in parts, fiery and bright in others.
Deaths And Entrances was, for me, a difficult first experience but my love for this record grows with each listen. At times it seems like an overtly intense, unsettlingly dark record with an uncompromisingly bleak outlook but it’s also full of warmth and beauty as well, life-affirming and uplifting as well as bruising. A startling, astonishing, awkward and ultimately, cherishable journey.
