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LP
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WHYT 098LP
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For their second album The Foel Tower, Quade holed up in an old stone barn in the cradle of a Welsh mountain valley. The valley was a stark and windswept backdrop with little daylight, as the band would huddle around crackling fires each evening. It was an environment that would shape the band -- a Bristol four piece made up of Barney Matthews, Leo Fini, Matt Griffiths, and Tom Connolly -- and the record they have made. It's an album that is as dreamy as it is melancholic, and as quiet and tender as it is forceful and potent -- gliding across genres like winds blowing over those wide-spanning Welsh hills -- to arrive at something the band half-jokingly, yet somewhat accurately, describe as "doomer sad boy, ambientdub, folk, experimental post-rock." In many ways, the making of this record goes way deeper than the simple writing, construction and recording of music. It is a profoundly deep and meaningful experience. It is a deep, dense record that is stuffed with musical, cinematic and literary influences -- from Ursula La Guin and Cormac MacCarthy through to RS Thomas and Yeats -- but despite the heavy, introspective and anxious nature of some of the material, it is also a record that is remarkably deft, agile and considered. Made with producer Jack Ogborne and mixer Larry 'Bruce' McCarthy, there is a pleasing duality to the final sound of the record. The album title also pays homage to the place that shaped it so greatly. Within this remote Welsh valley stands the Foel Tower, a stone structure filled with valves and cylinders that can raise and lower the level of the reservoir to draw off water. What makes The Foel Tower such an incredible record is that it feels born of a time, place and situation that only existed in that very moment. It's a snapshot of those ten days spent in rural Wales and all the feelings and anxieties the band were experiencing at that specific time, magically caught on tape.
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