The brutal beauty of Lanterns on the Lake

For Lanterns, the contrast between Colours and Beings is not as stark, but it is a commendable and very successful shift in tone. Hazel Wilde’s more languid vocals on the earlier records now give way to more forceful assertions, and there is a sinister chill, an uncomfortable brush with the threat if not the actuality of violence: “full-blooded words like knives, but it’s not the same since the old girl died” in "Faultlines" is some way from the more diffuse verbal imagery on Colours and on Gracious Tide, Take Me Home.

Songs now develop with a quickened ferocity, yet the band has not lost the ability to produce work of painful beauty, and here the exquisite ‘The Crawl’ presents a fearful, intoxicated grasp at an emotional involvement that remains just out of reach. This is an album of sometimes brutal beauty; a risk taken and richly rewarded through a work suggestive of fragility, yet simultaneously attesting to defiance rather than any maudlin self-pity.