Morning Bride – The North Sea Rising

Imprint

“Well I heard that you were spoken for/it’s hard to imagine anyone speaking for you,” sings Amity Joy Dunn in the opening of “Rosy Technology,” the latest Morning Bride single, taken from The North Sea Rising. It’s a great line and one that has fuelled my anticipation as I’ve been listening to this track for weeks after I received my copy of the CD.

To call this record eagerly awaited sounds clichéd, yet it was in our house anyway. The line up, changed somewhat since the band’s last release Greetings from Abney Park, make a sound that is tighter and more compressed as a unit. But at just six tracks long, weighing in at a sprightly thirty minutes, it is really only a mini-album. The songs are sublime, bearing the signature mournful melancholy of Mark James Pearson‘s lyrical sorcery, with the addition of Christine Lehmann’s violin layering in an ethereal feel. Where once cello added warmth, the violin adds height, wavering and soaring over the earthiness of the guitars and drums, and complimenting the clean simplicity of the vocal.

The opening track, “Blue Eyed Boy,” will be familiar to anyone who has seen these guys in a live context over the past seven years, a firm favourite rendered very cleanly on this new recording. “KX” is another familiar track, having featured in different form on Greetings; a ballad of modern loss and the comfort of the everyday, while “Death Rattle” remains one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard. Even after many listens it still makes me cry on the na-na-nas. There are three new songs, then: “Rosy Technology,” “The North Sea” and “Married in the Morning,” the latter penned by guitarist Pete Bennett in an upbeat departure from the signature melancholia of the rest of the record, and a joyful reprisal of the kind of rousing country sing-along these guys’ live performances are famous for.

“Rosy Technology” is possibly the sweetest song I’ve heard for a long time, a sort of nostalgic lament for the slower pace of life that leaves me yearning for a very present-day desire to get away from the hubbub of city life, while “The North Sea” also references that escape, though possibly into a somewhat bleaker future. Both songs are wonderful foils for Amity’s voice, which has mellowed and grown warmer with time, and perhaps also more Anglicised in her enunciation.

This album has been a long time coming, recorded as it was at the beginning of 2011, and it is possibly going to disappoint those who were hoping for a significant body of new material. However, what is here is genuinely lovely. What we will hear from Mark James Pearson, Amity Joy Dunn and Pete Bennett as a collective in the future, who knows. My enjoyment of their music is certainly added to with this somewhat short but bittersweet offering.

-Arwen Xaverine-