There’s some truth in the idea that you only really judge an album after the release of it’s successor. So I’ve put together some thoughts on Mostly Autumn’s previous two albums, Heart Full of Sky and Glass Shadows, both of which met with decidedly mixed reactions from fans and critics when they first came out.
The pre-orders of “Heart Full of Sky” shipped at the end of 2006, with the retail edition following in February. The pre-order limited edition was a double album with a second disk of bonus material, one track of which was eventually to find it’s way on to the single-disk retail edition of the album.
It was the work of a band in something of a state of flux. With founder member Iain Jennings having left the band at the end of 2005, it’s the only one of Mostly Autumn’s albums to feature Chris Johnson on keys, who surprised quite a few people by becoming part of the creative core of the band, writing four songs and taking the lead vocals for two of them.
I think it’s fair to describe it as the album that most sharply divided opinion amongst fans. For every person that loves the album, there’s another who thinks it’s by far the worst thing the band have ever done.
It certainly has some good points. It does contain what I consider to be three absolute classics in “Fading Colours”, “Find the Sun” and “Silver Glass”, up there with anything else Mostly Autumn have recorded. Heather’s “Half a World”, notably the only song on the retail disk where she’s is credited with music as well as lyrics, and Bryan’s epic prog-guitar workout “Further From Home” are also pretty impressive. That’s half an album’s worth of great music, which I would suggest is greatly preferable to a whole album of merely average songs. And I have to say Heather’s vocal performances are superb throughout.
Unfortunately for me the rest of the album isn’t really in the same league. We’ve got possibly the most controversial song in MA’s entire catalogue, “Pocket Watch”. Some have claimed it had the potential to be a massive crossover hit, but I think another reviewer summed it up very well with “It sounds like that band that sounds like every other band…”. In other words, it’s generic landfill indie, not the sort of music Mostly Autumn ought to be playing. You can’t have a hit with a song like that unless it’s 1996 and your name is Noel Gallagher.
Other songs seem half-formed; some decent musical ideas and motifs, but they don’t quite work as well as they should as complete songs. “Ghost”, “Dreaming” and “Walk With a Storm” all end up sounding a little bit like Frankenstein’s Monsters of songs made up from bits. Some of the individual bits, like the “Sign at the edge of the road” refrain Heather sings in “Dreaming” are superb, but too often the whole isn’t as good as the sum of the parts.
The second bonus disk is an equally mixed bag; it’s got the beautiful “Yellow Time” which was to find a home on Odin Dragonfly’s “Offerings”, and Chris Johnson’s sublime “Gaze”, which really ought to have gone on the single disk retail edition. On the other hand, Chris’ “Science and Machinery”, while a good song, fitted as perfectly into Parade’s live set last September as it didn’t in Mostly Autumn’s set three years earlier. Other songs like “Bright Green” sound like little more than demos that needed more work to become album-quality songs.
The album’s other big flaw is the production; it’s suffered very badly in the so-called “Loudness Wars”, with far too much the dynamics squeezed out of the record. I’ve heard it described as “unlistenable”; I don’t think it’s quite that bad, but on a halfway decent stereo it does not sound good, something which is very very apparent when you listen to it and the following album “Glass Shadows” back-to-back. If any MA album is a candidate for remastering, it’s this one. There are certainly songs that many people might only start to appreciate if the music is allowed to breathe.
It may be that the band were trying to experiment with some new ideas; certainly songs like “Broken” and “Blue Light” explored completely new territory, and I really can’t quite make up my mind if they work or not. But the impression the album gives is that the band had stretched themselves too thin trying to record a double album in a limited time, and didn’t have time to hone the arrangements. Even that best song, “Fading Colours” has changed significantly since being recorded; all those big vocal harmonies that give it such an epic cinematic feel live weren’t on the original studio version, but were added during rehearsals for the tour. And with three songwriters not quite pulling in the same direction the whole thing doesn’t really hang together as a coherent album in the way “Glass Shadows” does. I think what I find really frustrating about Heart Full of Sky is that I see the potential for a far better album; there are too many good ideas which weren’t properly developed.
The overall verdict four years on is that this is a real curate’s egg of an album; when it’s good it’s very good indeed, but suffers from serious flaws that can easily end up overshadowing the good bits.
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“Glass Shadows” came out in the spring of the 2008. With Chris Johnson having left the band to work on the solo project that was later to become Parade, the band were down to a creative core of just Bryan and Heather, with Bryan playing almost all the keys as well the guitars.
In contrast to the compressed and overproduced sound of it’s predecessor, the album has a far more stripped-down organic sound, far closer to how the band sound live.
Songwriting-wise it’s far more solid, and hangs together strongly as a coherent album despite Heather’s songs taking a markedly different musical direction from Bryan’s. There’s no real filler, and material like the much-criticised “Pocket Watch” are mercifully absent. But I feel it does lack the sort of absolute classic song in the league of “Fading Colours” or “Carpe Diem” to lift the album to the next level. “Tearing at the Faerytale” and the lengthy title track do come close though, and Heather’s “Unoriginal Sin” really came to life on stage. Indeed, the emotionally-charged live versions were the high point of the first set on the tour, and Live 2009 contains the definitive version of that song.
Only a couple of the songs don’t quite work for me. “Fireside” has a really great riff, and builds nicely through the verse and the bridge, but then simply doesn’t go anywhere. A pity, because it feels like there’s a Mostly Autumn classic somewhere in there trying to get out. “A Different Sky” isn’t really a bad song, but just doesn’t fit the album at all, which would have been far better ending at “Until the Story Ends”. Seeing as the band subsequently released the song as a single, in retrospect perhaps it should have been left of the album?
One downside is that the album that, like Heart Full of Sky it’s missing Iain on keys. While Bryan’s keyboard playing has it’s moments, such as that dramatic extended instrumental section of the title track, much of the keyboard playing is workmanlike rather than exceptional, and there are certainly one or two places where over-simplistic piano parts drag an otherwise good song down. But as well as the keys I also find Bryan’s guitar playing a little too mannered. Although he does play a couple of great solos, they’re very structured and perhaps a bit too Gilmouresque for comfort. Nowhere does he really cut loose the way we’ve seen on the latest album “Go Well Diamond Heart”, and on earlier albums like “Storms Over Still Waters”. It almost feels as if Bryan was neglecting the guitar while he focused on keys.
Overall, it’s still a good album, and there’s a lot to like about it. In many ways it feels like a response to much of the criticism of Heart Full of Sky. I don’t think it’s anywhere close to the career-defining masterpiece some declared it to be at the time, but I do feel it’s a vast improvement on it’s somewhat flawed predecessor. In some ways it’s a pity the band weren’t as bold in playing as much of the album live during the 2008 tours as they had with “Heart Full of Sky” a year earlier; certainly I’d have loved to have heard the title track performed live.
This post originally appeared in a slightly different form on the Mostly Autumn forum.
