Long-running Constellation-signed jazz/rock/folk band Do Make Say Think are to play live at London’s Electric Ballroom on November 27th, as part of ATP’s Don’t Look Back series of concerts. They’ve been drafted in to perform their excellent second album Goodbye Enemy Airship The Landlord Is Dead in full, as well as playing other tracks from their six albums’ worth of back catalogue. Although often lumped in with the ‘post-rock’ masses, Do Make Say Think are among the most interesting and consistently fulfilling bands to have emerged from that loose scene, drawing elements of kosmische, drone, folk and jazz into long, sprawling tracks that don’t so much build to a climax as ebb and flow for anywhere between eight and fifteen minutes.
In advance of the Goodbye Enemy Airship show, Dom and Ian who run Constallation have this to say about the album itself:
"When Do Make Say Think handed us their new record at the end of 1999, we were floored. We knew the band had sparked something special with their first album, but for us this was still a pretty abstract feeling and experience; unlike all the other groups we were releasing in the early days, DMST didn’t live in Montréal. We were still just getting to know them, we weren’t really connected to their scene in Toronto, we weren’t seeing them personally or playing live on any regular basis, and we couldn’t be sure how the heady mix of influences on their first album might play out.
With Goodbye Enemy Airship The Landlord Is Dead, the band delivered on every promise we had projected upon them! They truly established their seriousness, originality, soulfulness and narrative depth as an instrumental rock band. The first album was a tour-de-force debut of exuberantly controlled space-jams blending psych, jazz and breakbeat – but GEATLID tapped a whole new level of emotion and compositional tension, with a sonic palette and trajectory that was more raw and elemental while equally more subtle and complex. The record’s title, pulled from a Toronto street art paste-up that also serves as the album cover, perfectly evoked the powerful mix of defiance, isolation, melancholy, escape, communion, relief and jubilation that the album’s song cycle conveys.
Yup, we were floored. In 1999, Do Make’s brilliant sophomore album felt to us like a statement by a band that was here to say, and we could only hope at the time that this might prove true. The band proved it and then some, going on to release four more awesome records in the 2000s that we think makes them one of the most consistent, conscious and unpretentious groups to explore the expressive possibilities of genre-bending hybrid instrumental rock music."
