Erland & The Carnival are soon to release their third album, Closing Time. Out on August 25 via Full Time Hobby, it marks the first record in three years from the core duo, guitarist and singer Erland Cooper, relocated from Orkney to London, and the prolific Simon Tong, one quarter of Transmission, formerly of The Verve and The Good, The Bad & The Queen and a touring member of Blur and Gorillaz. (More recently, Cooper and Tong worked with Hannah Peel as The Magnetic North). The new album sees them moving away from the rearrangements of traditional folk songs that formed the basis of their first two albums, instead drawing from 40 newly-penned songs, with Cooper taking up production duties and Tong scoring the string quartet that laces the album.
Ahead of that, they’ll release the single ‘Birth Of A Nation’, out next Monday, August 11, backed with a remix of album track ‘Wrong’ by tQ favourite East India Youth, which we’ve got a first play of above. EIY’s William Doyle embeds Cooper’s vocals under scattershot electronic matter, giving way to a surging flux of strings before martial drums and some TOTAL STRIFE FOREVER-esque synths weigh in, building to a climax that falls away to cyclic layers of piano and violin sheen. Says Cooper: "TOTAL STRIFE FOREVER is my favourite record since Cluster’s Zuckerzeit. I watched [EIY’s] live show at the Sebright Arms in January and I really hoped he’d be open to do a remix of this song. Really happy he did. He’s created an atmosphere that exposes the lyric and takes it away from the original. I like that each of his songs create their own world, for as long as they want to exist."
Erland & The Carnival will be preceding the single with a show at the Servant Jazz Quarters in Dalston, London tomorrow, August 7, before a headline tour in October. Pre-order the album here and take a look at the dates below:
OCTOBER
Mon 13 – Broadcast, Glasgow
Tue 14 – Soup Kitchen, Manchester
Wed 15 – Jericho, Oxford
Thu 16 – The Musician, Leicester
Fri 17 – Purcell Room at the Southbank Centre, London (Full Time Hobby’s 10th Birthday Celebrations)
