Mt. Desolation
Mt. Desolation

Here is served the autumn album, ideal for accompanying evenings in front of the domestic warmth of a fireplace or, if you're more social, in front of one or more pints of beer inside your favorite British pub.
Indeed, it's in this latter environment that the idea of this supergroup seems to have been born. It's known that when alcohol starts to circulate, inhibitions fall, and some things said spontaneously can hide absolute truths and certainties. It happened that the two main members of Keane, Tim Rice Oxley and Jesse Quin, a derivative and certainly not indispensable group of British brit-pop without guitars, decided to dabble with a genre like country-folk. The idea involved friends such as Country Winston from Mumford and Sons on banjo, Ronnie Vannucci from the Killers, and Tom Hobden from Noah and the Whale, while the songs seemed to flow naturally, so much so that they were subjected to the preliminary judgment of the internet public, which quickly decreed their success. At this point, the step from the sketched idea to the album was short, confirming how often spontaneity pays off more than work planned at a table.

The atmosphere that pervades almost the entire album, with a few exceptions, is melancholic and reflective music, an alternative folk-country that seems to wink more at British folk than at America. In short, a sad drunk album.
The opening might be misleading with "Departure", a bouncy and fun song with a strong pop chorus, with Jessica Staveley Taylor's second voice providing a counterpoint that instead becomes the protagonist in "Another Night On My Side" while she duets with Jesse Quin. Almost Springsteen-like echoes emerge from "Annie Ford!" while in "State Of Our Affairs", one is catapulted along the British moors evoking tall, cold waves crashing against high rocky coasts. "The Midnight Ghost" is a lazy journey through America inspired by Jack Kerouac's "Dharma Bums", a novel that revisited the journey of "On the Road", but set in the nature of mountains and forests.
"Platform 7" is perhaps the most "American" song, a brisk and casual honky-tonk country that gives way to a "My My My", which with its harmonica tries to open up to desert horizons but ultimately remains firmly planted in Albion's soil and perhaps this is the characteristic that permeates the entire album. Not necessarily negative, but rather makes the album worth listening to and, in its small way, original.

Of the proclaimed American country, there is actually very little, but what has emerged is a fresh album with rarefied atmospheres, imbued with pop/folk melancholy, surely capable of enveloping the listener in a reassuring embrace from young artists on (autumn) vacation from their main bands.