Trembling Bells featuring Bonnie "Prince" Billy
Album: The Marble Downs
Label: Honest Jon's
Tracks: 10
Website: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Trembling-Bells/256466514334

Any new release from Glasgow's fabulous Trembling Bells always seems to come to my attention far too late in the day, when everyone else in the universe has already "been there, done that and bought the T-shirt" (or whatever); but invariably the disc will end up on my year's-best-of list, even though it will inevitably provoke a decidedly mixed reaction on first playthrough, albeit always one whose exact nature is also (perhaps illogically) becoming notoriously hard to predict. Heavy anticipation is borne out by a serious challenge to the senses, in an experience that combines intense skin-crawling aural pleasure, extreme (if sometimes frustratingly opaque) sonic splendour, high Gothic Drama and a certain measure of bewilderment and confusion in its contradictory cacophony of outré overkill and curious restraint. Whatever, it's absolutely always gonna be far too much to take in at first hearing!

The Marble Downs is the band's fourth full-length album, and, to state it most simply, takes the form of a collaboration with Will Oldham, Kentucky's illustrious Americana maverick. Unlikely musical bedfellows can often generate a vital spark that illuminates each partner's creativity and causes it to burn even more brightly, and this proves the case here, although for some listeners the result may not be easy to wholeheartedly embrace, at any rate initially.

Whatever the musical arguments though, there's no denying that Alex Neilson's songwriting is developing apace, for six out of the ten tracks are his compositions and their intense, alluring, often mysteriously romantic nature fits the cultured majesty of Lavinia Blackwell's voice like a glove, even if his lengthy titles are as sprawling as the loose, rumbling, loudplay-friendly musical landscapes they inhabit. These are characterised by unashamed sonic overload; distorted, fog-ridden ambiences; blinding, drenched organ; coruscating electric guitars; booming, muzzy bass and brass gestures; and wilful, tumbling drumming (Alex on typically imaginative form). The only track where instruments are absent is a rendition of the traditional folk ditty My Husband's Got No Courage In Him, which aside from the over-close-miking of the voices is a commendable effort (although not a natural choice for a duet arrangement perhaps).

Some of the songs might appear to reference traditional song forms - for instance, I Made A Date (With An Open Vein), after a foggy fanfare opening that resembles the stately intro to White Room, settles into a structure with a distinctly morose folk-ballad-like refrain, while the tenderly grandiose Love Is A Velvet Noose uses the "as I roved out" style of ballad as a springboard. Baroque-folk with fuzzy brassy pomp-and-circumstance (Home Service heard through a thick plush curtain) and tinklesome harpsichord support the majestic soaring of Lavinia's cultured soprano on Ferrari In A Demolition Derby. Several tracks take the form of call-and-response-style vocal duets between Will and the ever-incandescent Lavinia - two voices that don't exactly sit together in any conventionally duet-some way but entwine amidst their own off-kilter logic and despite timeslip cultural resonances of cheesy 60s duos like Sonny & Cher or Sinatra & Hazlewood - although the actual tenor of their dialogue on I Can Tell You're Leaving is more like the duelling-duetting sparring of MacColl and McGowan! It wouldn't be too fanciful to liken the way their individual voices conjoin within the dense sonic backdrops to the arrangement of veins within marble.

Other tracks may fitfully recall more modern musical idioms - Ain't Nothing Wrong With A Little Longing starts out with a backbeat of raw garage-type fairground-organ-grinding to service a song that Debbie Harry might've been proud of and then switches across into a doo-wop tempo, albeit filtered through a crazy soup of electrified distortion. Diversion and contrast is provided by the heaven-sent piano arpeggios of Excursions Into Assonance (Lavinia's captivating setting of a Dorothy Parker poem), where first Will's and then Lavinia's voice delicately, if ominously, bridges those troubled waters; and the doomy electric-Dylan-esque romance of Every Time I Close My Eyes (We're Back There) casts an eternal spell of darkness over its abundant lyricism. Will's ages-old composition Riding is here reworked into a sultry, broody Banshees-like charging, driving groove; and the album's final coup-de-grâce is a strange mantric cover of Robin Gibb's Lord Bless All that builds mightily from a convincingly reverential keening duet vocal to a psyched-up and spaced-out organ-and-burbling-synthy climax that might've come from an early Man concept album.

It's all mind-bogglingly, gloriously eccentric: wayward but perversely controlled; so just feel the power of the vision in this nightmare parallel musical universe as it continually falls apart then re-coalesces around your ears.

David Kidman