The Last Harbour – Lights EP

The skinny: A song that could’ve been a single, in very good company.

The review proper: The moody band, The Last Harbour, releases ‘Lights’ with some great b-sides (and an alternate take) less than a year after  Volo hit the shelves.

Ligths, the new mini-album by The Last Harbour starts with a little track fromVolo called ‘Lights’, a song that grows over and over. Starting with lead singer Kevin Craig’s creepy voice, all instruments start piling up to create a perfect atmosphere and one hell of an EP opener.

The remixed version of ‘If they’re right’ is a little quieter than the one in Volo, but it packs a bigger punch. The uneasy, dread-filled atmosphere and the shushed voice increases the spooky factor to levels the song didn’t reach in it’s more electric version.

But that’s the two songs that are alternate takes from Volo, what about the newer ones? These b-sides are more quiet and less melodramatic than what the usual The Last Harbour deals our way, but they are still full of a slow, sad longing.

‘Alone for the winter’ is very introspective, whereas ‘Boy in the photograph’ is pretty bleak and heartbreaking, with some interesting choices of percussion at the beginning (seashells?).

One good song deserves another and that is ‘Animals once more’, where the stark mood goes into dissonance from time to time, just to pull your feet and keep you on your toes. It’s the sound of Americana music specifically written to be the soundtrack of a gothic novel. Victorian dresses, a house falling apart and a windy Autumn afternoon. That’s Lights, the mini-album, in a nutshell.

Lights finishes with ‘Be Happy Tonight’, sort of the bookend to ‘Lights’. The song is a little similar to ‘Lights’, with the difference that the layers don’t pile up, but instead, all other instruments slowly and peacefully join after a small silence. The song never explodes, it just silently whimpers away.

The mini-album/EP comes in a nifty packaging, something that The Last Harbour seems to enjoy doing. This time around, it has a screenprinted comic telling the story behind the songs.

Lights has a cohesiveness that The Last Harbour has had in their music since Dead Fires & The Lonely Spark, and this sort of narrative is why these type of albums are enjoyable. Be warned, though, the mood is extremely stark and the pace is more on the slower side, so if you want something fast and punchy, you might need to skip this, but if you want something slow AND punchy, give it a try.

—Sam

Links

Website. Soundcloud. Myspace. Last.fm. Facebook. Spotify. Free EP. Video for ‘Lights’. Video for ‘Saint Luminous Bride’.

You can download a free sampler from the lovely artists that Red Rabbit Records has here.