Midlake – The Courage of Others

I was obsessed with this record. I get really obsessive about stuff – like I don’t just want to listen to it repeatedly, but I want to dissect it. I’m like a medieval doctor doing an autopsy, I always want to crawl into the record! Midlake are proper composers. These guys really have studied their craft, but without sentiment. On this album, you can hear they’ve absorbed the British folk era people from Pentangle onwards, all the psychedelic rock bands, the American folk influences in ‘Fortune’, all this stuff, very musically. They’re honouring what came before them but in their own tongue.