More about: MF Tomlinson

Crafted in January 2021 - a time that, for many, was claustrophobic in its loneliness - the Brisbane-born storyteller MF Tomlinson describes We Are Still Wild Horses as “another diary of a plague year”, the follow up and mirror image to his solo debut, Strange Time. If the latter title epitomises the uncanny experience of living through a pandemic, then this project is perhaps an exploration of the aftershock; it’s an attempt to make sense of what remains, now the dust has settled. 

We Are Still Wild Horses first graced my headphones when walking to work early one morning, the trappings of suburban London enveloped in a February fog such that you couldn’t see five metres ahead. Dulling the one sense seemed to have the effect of heightening the others, and as Tomlinson’s ragged baritone introduced opener ‘A Cloud’, the world was entirely obscured but for these four tracks. 

Drawing on the well-worn metaphor entwining the meteorological with the mental, both ‘A Cloud’ and ‘Winter Time Blues’ chart how the external can become insular. Soundscapes of Seasonal Affective Disorder, their shivering strings and meandering brass lines echo Tomlinson’s psychological retreat from light to shade. Each track serves as a step further into his psyche, their incremental lengthening leaving space for the textured arrangements to unfurl. Take ‘Winter Time Blues’: around the four minute mark, its jazz-adjacent instrumentation evolves into an extended guitar solo, cocooning the listener in a cloying, 70s-esque haziness. 

Given this multi-layered complexity, there’s something disarming about the sometime simplicity of Tomlinson’s rhyming couplets on the piano-led ‘The End of The Road’ (“I went to Trafalgar Square / There was a lot of people there”). Dueting with guest vocalist Connie Chatwin, their haunting harmonies envision the aforementioned “people” convening to witness doomsday. The track - which, fittingly, I initially misheard as ‘the end of the world’ - is a paean to stoicism in the face of horror, conveying a peaceful resignation to watching everything burn. 

And from the ashes of it all? 'We Are Still Wild Horses': Tomlinson’s album-closing, 21-minute opus. Akin to the atmospheric expansiveness of Four Tet, the eponymous piece delivers a masterclass in soundscape curation. Gradually building on sparse piano notes, the dead air blooms into a heady symphony encompassing drums, bass, brass, lilting flute and swirling synths. Like the earlier electric guitar, this full-bodied production obfuscates your surroundings utterly, eventually fading from off-kilter rhythms to leave nothing but a lingering reverb and the imprint of what’s been internally stirred up. 

As an album, We Are Still Wild Horses taps into the same emotion as Black Country, New Road’s ‘Ants From Up Here’: that which isn’t quite in your conscious mind, but your gut; that which has you suddenly, inexplicably winded, even as you listen in the most innocuous of settings. And then the music ends, the fog lifts, and the world reappears again. 

We Are Still Wild Horses is out February 17th

Grab your copy of the Gigwise print magazine here.

More about: MF Tomlinson