Singer/guitarist Erland Cooper, The Good The Bad & The Queen’s Simon Tong and drummer David Nock from Paul McCartney’s The Fireman make up this heralded new offering from the UK.Deriving their name from Jackson C Frank’s song, My Name is Carnival - a cover of which appears on the album - the trio play catchy, psych-freak folk with a mix of romantic and unsettling subject-matter. Lyrics and music are gleaned from bits and pieces of existing poetry and songs. Words from the likes of William Blake and Leonard Cohen are used and reworked, while Derby Ram takes from newspaper cuttings in its true story of teenager who - coaxed and filmed on camera-phones by a crowd below - jumped from the top story of a car park in an English town.
Britain has a rich tradition of bands that make slightly odd yet irrepressibly jaunty psychedelic folk music, and there are reference points aplenty here. Love Is a Killing Thing opens with the pots-and-pans instrumentation of Mystery Jets, You Don’t Have To Be Lonely has a Jim Noir-esque chorus, the aforementioned Derby Ram has a Super Furry Animals electo outro and there’s barely a song on the album that doesn’t sound a bit like The Coral. There are a few nice pace changes too, like the hushed Disturbed This Morning, with Cohen’s poetry given a pretty backdrop of acoustic guitars and horns.
Quintessentially English in its sound, Erland and The Carnival is a weird and wonderful treat, and potentially one of the best debuts from a UK band this year.
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