I’m a pretty hardcore vinylist. I like the sound, the feel and the packaging. Few CDs really measure up in the packaging department. There are notable exceptions, but the clinicality of a CD isn’t just sonic: generally speaking, there’s a pervasive uniformity of packaging, and there’s no warmth to a jewel case. The sleeve of Portico’s third album, ‘First Neighbours’ impressed me. It’s beautifully designed, has curious overlayed artworks, it’s made of heavy matt card and folds out in all sorts of directions with an inventive way of housing the CD within. Gets my vote.
Oh yes, the music, I almost forgot. It’s good stuff. The opening salvo of ‘The Battle of Duck Lake’ and the title track are quietly gripping, possessing a delicately-poised tension that’s hard to define but deeply enticing.
It tails off a bit and slumps to a patch of ever so slightly average jangly-guitar indie for the tracks that follow, but Lyn Heinemann’s vocals, which possess a tingle-inducing quality and really do have the capacity to draw the listener in and to lift what may otherwise be an ordinary song into higher realms, coupled with some fantastic and subtle harmonies do keep it ahead of the pack of mediocrity.
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‘Frank Slide’ is the clear centrepiece in every sense, a towering monument of a track which stands, stark and immense, bang in the middle of the album. It begins as an almost dirge-like trudge – and I mean this as a positive thing – before exploding into a collision of brass and strings about four minutes in. It’s epic, and returning to the two-chord trudge over which Heinemann delivers the melancholy tale of a landslide which buried the town of Frank, Alberta, killing 76 in 1903 the harmonies build in a beautiful and somewhat haunting, spine-tingling way.
The recurrent focus on historical events and tragedies, coupled with majestic orchestration might suggest a similarity to iLiKETRAiNS, but the comparison really starts and ends with these factors. That said, even without the monumental crescendos that are iLT’s trademark, they’ve produced an album that is both subtle and captivating.
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