My Latest Novel

After skulking around the local music scene for the past couple of years, threatening amazing things, 2006 was the year it all took off for Glasgow/Greenock marvels My Latest Novel. That’s saying something, considering the summer of 2005 alone saw them release their first single, Sister Sneaker Sister Soul, to huge acclaim and support Pixies on a bill that also included Teenage Fanclub and Idlewild. Following the March release of overwhelmingly lovely debut album Wolves, though, they were inescapable in Glasgow indie circles: threatening to upstage Sons And Daughters in the open-air finale to Ayr’s Burns An’ A’ That festival, partnering Camera Obscura in a showcase gig at Glasgow Uni’s QMU, triumphantly closing the ABC stage at the inaugural Indian Summer in Victoria Park. It only seems fitting, then, that following sojourns to Canada and Australia in the past couple of months, they should come home for a celebratory year-end gig in Tut’s, the spiritual home of Scottish indie.
Their growing success over the past year is all the more remarkable when you consider how much about them just shouldn’t work: that almost painfully precious name, punctuation-prone song titles (like Wrongfully, I Rested), spoken word segments, a fondness for instruments like glockenspiels and melotrons, the credit on the album sleeve that reads “additional vocals on ‘Learning Lego’ by Ravenscraig Primary School Children’s Choir”… it all makes them seem so studiously indie that you’d be forgiven for wondering if they were just taking the piss out of Belle And Sebastian.
The key to their success, though, is that like their Bella Union label-mates, The Dears, everything they do is founded on honest, unfiltered, raw emotion, something that becomes abundantly clear live when you can see the effort writ large on their faces. None of what they do is a mere pose; it’s catharsis, for them and us alike.
They also know how to use dynamics and instrumentation to their advantage in a way very few other bands do. It’s disarming to realise, seeing the songs played in front of you, how often there’s only a single instrument being played when the album sounds so lush; how often it gets so quiet that the crowd start shushing each other. Tonight’s set starts with album opener Ghost In The Gutter, and if there’s been a more dramatic opening to any album (or live set) this year, we haven’t heard it - a slow builder that starts off sounding like the soundtrack to some lost Scottish western, all solitary guitars, slides and ominous drums, adding new parts here and there before erupting in a joyous, spine-tingling swirl of three-part harmonies and violin four minutes in, then ending quietly, chanting “ghost in the gutter/doesn’t really matter” over and over until it’s done and you’re left breathless, eating out of their hands.
From here on in, it’s like every great Scottish indie band ever rolled into one: bits of Belle And Sebastian, Arab Strap, Mogwai, The Delgados, Idlewild’s folksier moments and Teenage Fanclub all surface at some point, but it never sounds like thievery, or even an homage; more like they’ve cracked a way to combine all those disparate sounds into one coherent whole. The Hope Edition weaves its sweet way through delicately picked guitars and perfectly-judged handclaps, realising that sometimes words just don’t cut it; When We Were Wolves, wonderfully, seems more piratey in its own sea-shanty-ish way than anything to star Johnny Depp; Sister Sneaker Sister Soul manages to be simultaneously intimate and epic, and is received like a stadium rock anthem; barely any of the songs finish the same way they start, shifting and changing as they go; and throughout, the audience treat them with a level of devotion that suggests they’re well on their way to being regarded as Scottish indie royalty. It’s another defining moment for the band in a year full of them. Roll on 2007.
- Chris Ward for www.brazenmagazine.co.uk

Fine Post-Post-Rock From Touted Glaswegians

Wolves raises the spectres of both post and alt rock, but adeptly avoids the lethargy of americana which has settled like a fog on both genres.It's a root stew of sea-shanty, melodic guitar, sober violin and unsettling percussion interventions, as on the hammering-on-the-front-door-at-mid-night of "Learning Lego".Singularly, MLN match both lyrical and musical busy-ness, particularly on "The Job Mr Kurtz Done" with its highly inventive Brian Wilson-esque vocal arrangments.An album and a bad you want to find out more and more about.

- Uncut

"More Than Just The New Arcade Fire"

Let's get this out of the way:yes, My Latest Novel share similarities with Arcade Fire. But what will make you rend your garments and dance with joy are the differences between MLN and theur Canadian kin: they revel in the sounds made by noises, and whip through a heady mixture of Georgian chanting, stop-start-now-go rhythm patterns and alarming vocal tricks. It's an unsettling world, especially on When We Were Wolves, which feels like the episode of Buffy where Xander became a hyena, only with the threat amplified. Fight the fear, though as this is a part of the woods which rewards multiple visits

- NME UK

Romantic Boho-RockBravado from Greenock Quintet.

If they weren't hell bent on taking risks, these Scots could easily settle on being a replacement Belle and Sebastian, given their ramshackle, velvets sweetness, guitar-violin axis, boy-girl harmonies and more than an occassional traipse into the land of fey. But MLN inject their indie-pop frame with a swarthy melodrama that's more Tindersticks in flavour, and the word 'kickass' comes to mind when they really get going. The MLN experience is best savoured on 2005's lengthy debut single Sister Sneaker Sister Soul, with its languorous mood giving way to a violin-driven meltdown, but its matched here in range by Ghost in the Gutter and in tenderness by The Hope Edition. There's poetry too, "But just like a star, my pining subsides/Dropes but then swells, clamps my insides," If vocalist Chris Deveney is preoccupied by girl (or boy) trouble, his pain is memorable.

- MOJO Magazine

Only three months in and already 2006 has been a terrific year for music. Alongside excellent albums by established favourites like Morrissey (his most rewarding, determinedly serious record for years), Belle & Sebastian, Mogwai and Isobel Campbell / Mark Lanegan, there's been a host of new bands to get over-excited about (from the Arctic Monkeys and The Long Blondes to The Research and Tilly And The Wall). And here's another gem to add to the year's embarrassment of riches.

A twentysomething five-piece from Glasgow, My Latest Novel first came to our attention with the soft folk pop of "The Hope Edition", a quietly beautiful blur of jangled guitars and wistful recorder melodies that instantly pegged them as successors to Belle & Sebastian. Catching the band live was an entirely different affair however - they opened with a brooding post-rock instrumental and then proceeded to lurch, waltz and glide between hints of the Arcade Fire, Sons And Daughters and The Delgados. Understandably, we were smitten.

"Wolves" brings all of the above together with staggering ease, the group propelled by their meticulously artful vision and reams of ambition. "Ghost In The Gutter" and "Pretty In A Panic" kick the album off with a sense that this is a band with things to be achieved. The songs build with an almost military pride, upping the tension and momentum with their eyes on the horizon, but then pull different stylistic handbrake turns - the former bursting into a group chant, the latter dropping back for a coda of spoken word.

There's a sense that My Latest Novel inhabit a childlike-world of their own imagining - somewhere between Narnia and Neverland - but they're never cloyingly twee or affectedly infantile. "When We Were Wolves" could be a Victorian parlour game - "and we ran and we hid…and we banged on our pianos" - but there's something reassuringly dark lurking here too. "Wrongfully, I Rested" also charts a curious semi-innocence, naïve and serious and fit to burst with where they could go next.

Lyrically, the band tend towards the oblique. Often you're not entirely sure what they're getting at, but as with the many sudden (yet elegantly performed) changes in direction and the dark Victorian childhood world they inhabit, it's clear that there's a definite logic at work here - all that's left for the listener to work it out. This may prove a stumbling block with albums to come, but right now joining the dots between the wordy twee pop of "The Job That Mr Kurtz Done" and the anthemic decay of "Learning Lego" is all part of the fun.

A truly stunning debut
- Yahoo!

It begins in the most sedate of ways. Coming across as the next band to help the new Folk renaissance - acoustic guitars accompanied by the kind of balladry we've heard from Scottish bands before. But, where it takes you from here though is a whistle stop tour of British music past, present and maybe even future.

This Scottish five-piece certainly aren't afraid of using instruments - every song here seems to built upon layers upon layers of music, a lush blanket of sounds reminding me of Sufjan Steven's latest effort. There's also an interesting blend of vocals, both male and female, mixes of spoken word and singing. My Latest Novel becomes an appropriate name for this band - listening to this is like getting stuck into a good book, you submerge yourself into it, let it wash over you, picking up on little threads here and there and trying to follow them through these rich and evocative songs.

A great example of their ability to build a song is Learning Lego, beginning as a gentle strum, it builds into a sea shanty half way through (reminding me in parts of The Decemberists) before descending into a chanting school choir. Another band with which they get compared to is The Arcade Fire, and it doesn't take much to draw similarities between the two. They could be a British alternative to them - weaving disparate influences to form a dense web of music which becomes more than the sum of its parts. Though not everything on offer here is wildly ambitious, they can keep things simple and create songs with folkish tendencies. The Hope Edition certainly reminds me of James Yorkston's album (with added whistling) and Sister Sneaker, Sister Soul is the best song Belle & Sebastian never wrote until it descends into a beast of a crescendo of guitars, violins and everything but the kitchen sink - something their fellow countrymen Mogwai would be proud of.

As you might have guessed, there's plenty going on here; all kinds of influences flowing through the mix, but mentioning all these other bands distracts from what this album and My Latest Novel have achieved - the ambition to try something a little bit different, to take their obvious influences and spin them into something they can call their own, to create a sound they're comfortable in. Highly recommended.
- www.cdtimes.co.uk