Tall Ships - Impressions (2017)

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Tall Ships - Impressions (2017)

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There couldn’t be a more fitting reintroduction to the world of Brighton’s Tall Ships than ‘Road Not Taken’, the slow-burning opener to Impressions, their second full-length album - released early 2017 via FatCat Records. Rooted in the idea of facing a fork in the road, the four-piece’s frontman Ric Phethean describes the track - which draws its title from Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken - as tackling “the consequences of our choices and actions, and the regrets that come with them;”striving to “make the most of the moment, as it’s the only thing you’ve got any control over.”

It’s an apt opening salvo for a record borne through several years of difficult gestation; of ill health and financial uncertainties, disconcerting false starts and feeling like it could all collapse at any moment. In the four years since the band - completed by bassist Matt Parker, drummerJamie Bush and keyboardist Jamie Field - released their debut album Everything Touching in October 2012 to an initial period of hype that saw them championed by the BBC and NME, selling out shows across the UK including London’s Scala, and headlining the BBC Introducing Stage at Reading and Leeds Festival, events for the band began to take a turn for the worse that would require an uphill struggle to set right.

“It all just crumbled away for a little while,”says Phethean. After five years of hard graft building toward Everything Touching, of industry plaudits and ever-growing audiences, they found themselves with no management and no label, forced to confront the fact it all could’ve been a false start. A lesser band would have packed it in and moved on; that band would not be Tall Ships.“We were emotionally, physically and financially spent. We needed a break for a while to pay off debts we’d accumulated, recover from health issues and simply do our own thing.”

By the end of 2014 though, the seeds of a new set of songs - those that would go on to become Impressions - had been sown as touring responsibilities began to wind down, and they weren’t about to let them not see the light of the day. A key theme among them being, in the words of Phethean, “our instinctual will to survive.”Nowhere is this more greatly evidenced than on the driving, euphoric ‘Will to Life’- a riff on German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s idea of “Wille Zum Leben”(will to live). “Schopenhauer thought of this as a negative thing”Phethean explains, “but ‘Will to Life’has a more positive slant: it’s about battling the darkness and sadness we feel throughout our lives through companionship. How people and relationships are the only way to cope with the apparent futility of existence.”

In keeping with this mindset, unperturbed by the more off-putting elements of the past few years, the band began to shop early demos of Impressions around labels and while offers were received, nothing quite felt right.“They didn’t leave us with enough creative control. It’s important for us to have the final say in our songs, our videos, our artwork, our track-listing, etc, etc, and we really didn’t want to compromise that for a bit of money.”

Eventually, all four members reached what they describe as “a flip point in mentality”in which their strong-headed side took hold. Fed up with the movers and chancers of an industry that can be a very unwelcoming place, they knuckled down to self-record the album at Field’s Devon home on the edge of Dartmoor - mimicking the process used on Everything Touching in 2012 and using the same gear, techniques, et al - while all returning to full-time work alongside it. “There would be no album without us making it ourselves,”saysField. “We couldn’t wait on other people any longer. We recorded and engineered it all. The DIY nature of it is one of necessity, not aesthetic.”

The results speak for themselves: Impressions bristles with a fresh intensity but is also the product of a much wiser, more centred band than the Tall Ships of a few years prior - the result of everything they’ve learned via the peaks and troughs of their recent history. It’s a set that feels constantly on a knife edge of unpredictability: capable within a single song of being both disconcertingly tender and universal - easily the most ambitious and anthemic music the band has ever written (most notably see ‘Petrichor’, ‘Meditations On Loss’and the aforementioned ‘Will to Life’), marking them out as one of the UK’s most promising rock bands but one worn with the battle scars of doubt, fragility and lessons learned the hard way. Speaking of its titling, Phethean describes Impressions as, “the indentations that are left in us from the pressure and the bashing we get whilst being alive. Life can be an incredibly difficult thing at times and the tragic events, joyous events and tender moments all leave their marks upon us.”

Looking back on the album’s testing birthing process it feels a particularly befitting title, but Parker views it all as being necessary to what this record would become: “If someone had just come to us and given us the money to make a second album right away, it would’ve been completely different. It’s a product of everything that’s happened over the past four years.”Listening to it now, what shines through is just how a truthful a document of strife and struggle it is, not just for four young British musicians, but for a generation facing greater uncertainty and bigger decisions than in decades - and yes, more than a few roads not taken.