Distilling Diamonds from Cheese - Midlake

A makeshift beer garden on a pub car park in the middle of a grubby Leeds industrial estate that remains relentlessly grey even on a blazingly sunny summer day might not be the most appropriate of places for a Midlake interview. In place of the greenery that seeps from the pores of the Denton, Texas five-piece’s acclaimed second album ‘Trials of Van Occupanther’, the location of Gigwise’s chat with the band’s singer and songwriter Tim Smith is littered with rundown factories, scruffy shopping outlets, exhaust fumes and other dour debris of a concrete wasteland.

At least the New Roscoe, the venue where the band will later tonight turn in another triumphant performance on their near sold-out debut UK tour proper, boasts an uncommonly fitting name for the occasion. As it happens, Midlake’s latest single is also called ‘Roscoe’, and the track, an amalgam of Creedence Clearwater Revival chug, Crazy Horse crunch, sumptuous melodies and the kind of soaring vocal harmonies that were last executed with this much aplomb when David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young fame was still on his first liver, offers a captivating glimpse of the riches the stunning album many are already calling the finest of the year is crammed with.

That the first chapter of the band’s journey to five-star reviews and donning Flaming Lips’ Santa Claus outfits (as some members did recently when the bands toured together) involved exchanging knowing winks with the other musos in the audience whilst navigating slick licks and unnecessarily busy grooves makes their recent melodically endowed achievements even more palpable. Assembled from music students who hang out together in Denton’s bustling music scene (the small - population 80,000 - Texan town was also home to the late, lamented Lift to Experience), Midlake’s first incarnation specialised in - groan - jazz-funk. So deeply immersed in honing his jazz chops that rock music wasn’t really on his radar, one landmark late 90’s album managed to make a big enough impact to rescue Smith from a lifetime of pathological aversion to anything approaching a tune.

“OK Computer’ was pretty huge for me”, reminisces Smith, who with his tidy beard, soft-spoken manner and unflashy clothing resembles a college music teacher more than he does one of this year’s most raved about alt. rock prospects. “I was playing saxophone at the time, and really fell in love with that album. We were off, trying to get our songs down to four minutes, get some singing in there, put down the saxophone and pick up the guitar and try to write some real songs instead of just jamming.”

The new direction paid off. Midlake were eventually snapped up by celebrated indie Bella Union after label boss and one-time Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde caught an earful of the band’s demo, and their debut ‘Bamnan and Slivercork’ arrived in 2004. Strong as that keyboard-dominated platter is, it was still fairly derivative stuff, waist-deep in debt to its inspirations - Radiohead, naturally, as well as Flaming Lips, Grandaddy and Mercury Rev - and occasionally prone to resorting to their more annoyingly gimmicky tendencies. Something was amiss, as the band soon figured out. "We thought our first album was good, but we realised needed better songs,” Smith admits. “We wanted to make a better, warmer, more personal sounding album, an album that people can connect with.”

All it took was a bit of a time warp. Instead of the contemporary references of ‘Bamnan and Slivercork’, most of the forebears of the new album’s sound - Neil Young, The Band, Joni Mitchell - were in their pomp during the mustiest mists of the 1970’s. The platter’s peaks, however, don’t just rip off giants of a bygone era; they actually rival their inspirations in soothing warmth, enchanting ambience and, crucially, songwriting muscle, whilst excelling in moulding something fresh and unique from timeworn ingredients. Smith is an unrepentant sucker for vintage soft-rock (the band’s pre-gig tape trumpets cheese merchants such as ELO and Doobie Brothers), but the self-produced ‘…Van Occupanther’ replaces every iota of the smug irony and pastiche exercises of the ‘Guilty Pleasures’ brigade with unfashionable displays of sincerity and emotional depth that can’t help but move even the most cynical of listeners to wide-eyed wonderment. What prompted the band to turn back the clocks, inspiration-wise?

“After the first album I got hooked on that era. That music seems warmer and more honest, it’s just more emotional to me than a lot of the stuff I hear today,” Smith ponders, before reeling off a list of defiantly uncool favourites (America, Elton John, Fleetwood Mac), the mere mention of which is fit for causing acute outbreaks of panic amidst trend-chasing scenesters.