The Silent League – But You’ve Always Been The Caretaker

With the New York tag, normally comes visions of black leather jackets and black skinny jeans; trend-setters abandoning guitars for synths in a quest for cool. Sidestepping this assembled throng of scene chasers, Brooklyn based The Silent League have their hearts in an entirely different New York; a musically historic up-state New York: the Catskill Mountains. Spiritual home to The Band and name checked by the likes of Beck and Mercury Rev.

Over the last five years, the collective — lead by Justin Russo, who at the time of the band’s formation was playing keyboards for Mercury Rev — has been periodically forming, releasing records (their second, Of Stars and Other Somebodies, never receiving a release in North America), playing a few shows and then disappearing again. Over the years the band has been made up of a varying cast including members of Interpol, Arcade Fire, Beirut, St. Vincent, Stars Like Fleas and Bishop Allen. In its current incarnation the band has Shannon Fields on board as producer and performer to help create a record of perfectly executed soft-pop gems.

Sonically, But You’ve Always Been The Caretaker (the band’s third long player) sits alongside the likes of Mercury Rev and The Flaming Lips; across its 15 tracks its glides effortlessly on with a confident grace, punctuated by a series of shorter musical vignettes (‘Egg-shaped’, ‘Sleeper’, ‘But You’ve Always Been The Pilot’, ‘How And Why Our Dads Lost The War’).

A collection of middle-tempo, grand, orchestral numbers make up the bulk of the album, each one drawing in the listener with an of opening of delicate pianos and fragile vocals before a raft of brass, strings, guitars and all manner of synthesizers enter the fold creating blankets of comforting, lush, space-rock. And that’s the musical theme that permeates the record; explicitly on the so-ELO-it-hurts ‘Yours Truly, 2095′ (“Maybe some day I’ll feel her cold embrace / I’ll kiss her interface”), with nods to Ziggy-era Bowie on ‘Here’s A Star’, and on ‘Dayplanner’, which with its pedal steel, squelching synths and saxophone solo, could easily have been lifted from Dark Side Of The Moon.

On penultimate track ‘Final Chapter Meeting’, Jean-Michel Jarre bleeps and pieces dance around a foreboding vocal: “Sounds like plague / seems like everybody’s got something”. The track builds to a four bar repetition, every cycle bringing new elements: a chorus of vocal euphoria, walls of distorted guitar punctuate the bottom, while a group of horns play over and over until they lose control.

To think that The Silent League are an on again/off again collective is beguiling when the output is this accomplished. What they present here is an album of such accomplished majesty and width, unashamedly nodding to its influences that stands shoulder to shoulder with any contemporary comparisons. This is hairs on the back of your neck stuff.

mp3:> The Silent League: ‘There Is A Caretaker In The Woods’

Buy the album from Rough Trade