Track Listing

1. Sake
2. Trains to Brazil
3. Made Up Lovesong #43
4. Over the Stairs
5. Who Left the Lights Off, Baby?
6. Cats Eyes
7. Go Away
8. My Chosen One

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #41039 in Music
• Released on: 2006-03-27
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: EP, Import

Customer Reviews

Music to make you happy!
This EP by the Guillemots is my first taster of this fairly new band. I say EP because that's how it is billed, I think correctly, because it is a collection of singles and other material recorded between 2003 and 2005 rather than being a collection of songs recorded with an "album" in mind.

However, I am going to call "From the Cliffs" an album - whilst not conceived as such it has been cleverly produced and has that magical cohesive quality of all the best albums: each song sits very neatly in its own place within the whole; you feel that changing the running order just slightly would detract from the overall enjoyment. Take the opening and closing songs, "Sake" and "My Chosen One", both sung beautifully to an unaccompanied piano - perfect album planning and placing, giving the album a wonderful musical symmetry.

You can already tell that I like this! It is glorious - it is one of those albums you can listen to whatever the mood. It has quiet, slow, gorgeous songs that will comfort you should you be feeling down but will delight you should you be happy; and boppy, joyful ones that will always lift you, even if you're already high! Irrespective of pace, the music is always melodious.

Guillemots are a four piece group: its main creative influence appears to be the main songwriter, Fyfe Dangerfield, who also dabbles in the production. However, the glory of this album comes not just from the four members of the band but from the collection of 11 other musicians that have contributed. The instrumentation of the arrangements is rich and wonderful. Always appropriate, you get violin and viola dominating large sections of the spooky "Over the Stairs" and joyous brass and woodwind on the boppy numbers such as "Trains to Brazil". In their lighter moments Guillemots sound like Paul Weller's Style Council on their happy tunes such as "Shout to the Top", but they have more musical substance and variety than the Style Council (and they are certainly not political! - love is the most constant theme here).

I always find categorising music into genres difficult and Guillemots' is no exception. They are more pop than rock, indeed it's not until the penultimate song "Go Away" that we hear some angry, rock guitar. But it would be facile to classify this as pop - the songs have significant depth and together with the complexity of instrumentation you are edging into "progressive" territory. So I'm settling for progressive-pop.

Guillemots released a (proper) album in 2006 called "Through the Window Pane" which is now high on my CD list, waiting for the kitty to fill up!

80s Nostalgia
Beautiful stuff, think Deacon Blue meets The Blue Nile and you're almost there. Bath music at its best.

from thec cliffs
ok you may say its done before....
but.......
awesome...........
upliftling..........