Tag: 2012

An album well worth adding to you collection. ….Fay is at her best when harmonising with herself on top of a driving Hammond groove, and there is plenty of that going on here – I am just surprised that Jools Holland hasn’t featured her on his ‘Later’ show yet as this is spectacularly ‘on message’ with what he is doing. Following her triumphs in recent years with her albums, ‘Realm’ and ‘1975’, this is another big win – long may she continue writing and recording.

We’ve all heard musicians’ sob stories about how boring life can be on the road. It’s a fair point. That supposedly glamorous lifestyle is more often than not a crushingly tedious cycle of road, hotel, soundcheck, hotel, gig, hotel, road. What we’re less likely to hear is a road-inspired album that turns all notions of tedium inside-out, an album that celebrates the sadness, the isolation, and uses them to fuel music that sees beauty in the mundane and everyday.

Warrington based musician Paul Fleming (aka Baltic Fleet) spent time as a touring member of Echo And The Bunnymen, it was during this time that he put together Baltic Fleet’s eponymous debut album, released in 2008. This latest album Towers sees him build on the themes of the first album, using motorik rhythms, repetition, layered synths, and new-wave guitar lines to create an album that’s detached yet emotional, varied yet coherent. And above all very listenable and moving.

Along with the dominant krautrock influences there are also detectable traces of the North-West’s most famous musical sons; the Will Sargeant eastern-style guitar motifs on the title track and lead single Engage, along with the Hooky-esque bassline on Hunting Witches. There may also be echoes of the halcyon nights of Manchester’s Hacienda and Liverpool’s Cream in the driving rhythms, albeit with a detached, outside-looking-in feel.

This is an album that despite its sense of loneliness and isolation, is a celebration of industrial landscapes, a celebration of the places that tourist boards don’t show in their brochures. As on the album’s artwork think cooling towers, think oil refineries, power stations, dockyards and warehouses. Think container ships passing in the dead of night on the cold North Sea. All cold, steely, grey images but also beautiful, much like this remarkable album.

Former Echo & The Bunnymen keyboardist Paul Fleming returns with this single taken from forthcoming album Towers. (Single, temporarily free download)

Main-Fleet-man Paul Fleming musically relays his modern krautrock-ian version of Radio On (Christopher Petit’s classic 1979 road movie) with new album ‘Towers’. Think exceptional motorik beats, pulsing, rolling analogue synthesisers and faraway guitars evoking the sleep deprived trip from dusk to dawn and you’ll get the picture.

P-TCP readers of a select vintage may remember the BraveNew Europa vogue favoured by a brace of bands back in theearly 1980s, a virtual Moleskine note book of conotations anddenotations informing a run of sounds and source material fromBowie’s Station to Station, through to Simple Minds, SpandauBallet and Ultravox. A geo-cultural locale bordered byChristopher Isherwood novels, Cold War angst and Krafwerk’sTrans-Europe Express. It’s these same influences that simmerand shimmer throughout Baltic Fleet’s second Blow Up release,Towers. But this isn’t in any way an indulgence in foggy retro-futurism or revisionist history, far from it. Towers takes theghosts and echoes of broken unions, sleet soaked borderpatrols, noir-dark elegance/decadance and projects them intoan else-world of alternative future shocks, Eastern EuropeanMega cities under glass domes, where JG Ballard’s techno-erotisicm meets Kubrick’s sterilized cityscapes to a GiorgioMoroder soundtrack.Although for all that, Towers is played, programmed andproduced, not by a collective of anonymous auto-bots, but anactual human being, Paul Fleming, who has sculpted a portfolioof sleek, glossy soundscapes, sparring synthetic textures andbuffed rumbles, grumbles and growls that glide and collide likegiant icebergs, all the while keeping the heat of a humantouch. Take the Baltics out of the studio and into a liveenvironment (I’ve caught them in action twice) and theyblossom and boom with a thump and substance that lifts gig-goers into state of wild excitement. To paraphrase Bowie’s adcampaign for Heroes, there’s old wave, there’s Neu wave andthere’s Baltic Fleet.

Despite being on the verge of a second release under the Baltic Fleet moniker. Paul Fleming seems intrinsically tied to his role as sometime keyboardist for Echo and the Bunnymen. Which is a shame, because this project is something very special indeed. The cover of said release, Towers, features a series of vast cooling towers, a none-more-fitting indication of the sprawling, post-industrial landscapes lurking inside.
The driving kraut motorik draws unavoidable, but entirely favourable, comparisons to the likes of Neu, but this is undoubtedly a musical venture with its own distinct identity.
Fleming’s synth work is expectedly outstanding, and tracks such as March of the Saxons succeed in being ambient and evocative, expansive and ambitious.

Tune: Midnight Train

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