The Orielles - Only You Left: Album Review

Artwork for the orielles album only you left

3. 5 starsss

Amongst the layers on The Orielles’ new album ‘Only You Left’ there are unexpected rewards that feel like secrets.

Those who say modern musicians are unable to philosophise reckon without the likes of Henry Wade, guitarist of The Orielles.

Speaking about necessary growth, Wade has preached: ‘You’ve got to die and be reborn between albums,’ a regenerative process which singer and bassist Esmé Hand-Halford says for them, ‘Comes naturally’, ‘it’s not something we consciously do’.

The Orielles’ last outing, Tableau, saw them lauded for its experimentation, a by-product of widening their creative circle.

Now though, they’ve returned to their core as a trio, Wade acerbically stating that, ‘There’s nothing more trad than a three-piece’.

Only You Left began life on very different terms to its predecessor: between touring, The Orielles – whose line-up is completed by drummer Sidonie Hand-Halford – wrote meticulously with the end product always in mind, their approach the opposite to Tableau’s looser, studio-improv working.

When the songs were finally deemed good enough, recording was split between a renovated carpet factory on the Greek island of Hyrdra and a facility in Hamburg, the contrasts between environments naturalising both band and material.

Just the act of booking them catalysed things, Wade explains: ‘We were picturing recording it in this cold, clinical space in Hamburg or this laid back, bohemian, church-esque space in Greece. And then that just completely influenced how we played and how they were written.’

This, and Esmé’s use of a freeze pedal to bend and distort notes into grooves, left their music sometimes with a less obvious centre.

Opener Three Halves – originally a working title coined when it was merely Ableton threads stitched together – adroitly explores this new world, a melding together of Mogwai’s fierce post-rock aesthetics with a sweeter, fuzzy undertow.

In this construct, attempting to find a specific truth isn’t the right thing. You Are Eating A Part Of Yourself, which was retrieved from the group’s library of archive material and then reimagined, rolls forward with a kind of innocence despite the title, whilst the closer To Undo The World Itself employs vocals resonant of Elizabeth Fraser as it veers in tone between oblique art pop and theatrical shade.

Throughout this stapling together of meanings, an ambiguous flow pervades that’s rooted for instance in the album’s title – does it refer to ideas of loneliness, solitude or triumph?

This deliberate carelessness repeats itself on Tears Are, the stilted post-punk dynamic and its ultimate dissolution simultaneously asking a question and giving possible answers.

As should be obvious by now, we’re a long way from Calderdale and The Orielles’ glistery, outward looking 2018 debut Silver Dollar Moment, but on Shadow Of You Appears the route to or from there reappears via its tumbling grooves.

Amongst the layers there are also other unexpected rewards that feel like secrets, the airy funk of Tiny Beads Reflecting Light eventually nodding to Stereolab at their least charged.

Only You Left’s core straddles the lines between experimentation and being somewhere an audience can still reach.

Here, the percussive tribal rhythms of Embers are countered by vocal sweetness, whilst the scratchy alt disco of Wasp melds dead eyed handclaps to lush and ear catching melodies.

Some regard death and rebirth as inevitable parts of an endless cycle. Only You Left doesn’t feel like the product of something as radical though, and its more oblique angles will frustrate as many listeners as they dazzle.

On it, The Orielles haven’t settled for anything as straightforward as reinvention – and in process create a sonic canvas where any connection will be in the ear of the beholder.