There is nothing ordinary about Erland Cooper and his Carnival. Cooper hails from Orkney, a remote, sparsely populated archipelago just off the northern coast of Scotland with a strong tradition of Norse-originated folklore. Nightingale, an album of British folk-inflected tales, reflects a very specific, very regional flair for the curious. To wit: Cooper, along with former Verve and the Good, the Bad & the Queen guitarist Simon Tong, chose to record the album live, in the belly of an old warship-turned-cruise liner-turned-one-time pirate radio hub moored along the banks of the Thames in London. On its cover sits a relatively famous photo of Janet Hodgson being hurled across her bedroom, supposedly by a poltergeist. It's an art decision Cooper claims had an impact on the music found within, musing that he and his band are "trying to create a soundtrack to an imaginary horror film about the supernatural." So as you can see, long before we even hear a note, there's a lot going on.
But it doesn't add up to a very compelling listen. Background check aside, there isn't much air to breathe for any or one of Cooper's many ideas in a given song, leaving the record as a whole even less of a chance to cohere. Opener "So Tired in the Morning" is a deceptively titled standout, its pile-driving guitar hook and crispy, cannonball drums delivered on rails at a feverish clip that's pure red herring. Because with the exception of the lean, Franz Ferdinand-like jitter of "This Night", it's a song whose sharp focus can't be found anywhere else here. Take "Map of an Englishman" as a fine example. Organ-grinding synths open for a jouncy chorus that tumbles in and out of dizzying, carnival-inspired whir. While the arrangement is surefire, the hodgepodge nature of it all amounts to sonic bouillabaisse: Warped-in chunks of the 1960s bump up next to one another everywhere, be it in the form of Super Furries psychedelia, Beck-like swirl, pastoral folk plucks, or the cinematic sweep of Ennio Morricone.
Much of Nightingale is as fit for the screen as Cooper had intended. "Emmeline" is hugely evocative, welding more crusty organ to phasered strum and a snare rim gallop that's not too, too far out of Monument Valley. "I'm Not Really Here" sounds like it was writen with old Bond films in mind, and "Wealldie" is a series of stiched-together, haunted-house experiments that put that old boat's drippy ambiance to clever use. While the latter eventually blooms into a resplendent, memorable coda, the hairbrained route it takes to get there is indicative of Nightingale's most crippling problem. When Cooper is direct, his songs are all the more vibrant for it. When he buries his hooks or melodies, the results meander too much to warrant revisting. Some efforts find a way to fuse both approaches well. "East and West" is a beautiful, fingerpicked folk tune that doesn't cave under its zany synth flourishes, and, like its namesake, the titular track simply sings. There are martial drums and carousel keys and wild-eyed guitars and even faint rumbles from deep inside that boat. But "Nightingale" is not as self-consciously and aggressively manic as most of the album its named after. That's why it works.
