Wednesday 13 January 2010

The Dawn Chorus - The Guilt

Having already featured one UK south coast band this week here, now here’s another -The Dawn Chorus, a group we've previously written about from the live environment when playing with other bands, but never in their own right until today.

The Dawn Chorus describe themselves as being a “six piece (often seven-piece) musical collective from nowhere in particular, Hampshire, England.” It’s a pretty vague description but then if we described their music as being indie-folk-country-pop (which it is) then that would be pretty vague as well. Not that there is anything uncertain about the stance of the bands musical clout which veers between glorious rabble rousing chants that are never pretentious or overblown, to softer almost maudlin Bright Eyes-esque sounding acoustic balladry. With a debut album The Big Adventure released in 2008, 2010 finds the band returning with their second album The Carnival Leaves Town. For this release The Dawn Chorus widen their sights in terms of instrumentation with banjo, accordion and melodica being added to the mix. There is also a guest appearance from one of the most hard gigging men out there - Frank Turner on the song Carnivalesque. We’ll be bringing a full review of the album at the start of February.

For the meantime here is a video that the band have recently uploaded for one of the lead tracks from the album. The song is called The Guilt. The Guilt finds The Dawn Chorus musing on infidelity, maturity and wanting to letting yourself go, whilst a raucous shout-a-long tub-thumping blast of musical authenticity muscles the song home. Then just as it’s all getting a little too hectic, lead singer Kyle Evans pauses for reflection and sings mournfully “So here I go, I’ve just got to find something to compensate for my lack of drugs and rock n roll. Heaven knows, I‘m not proud of it.” The good boy can still do bad then.

They may be on a small independent label, but with this song The Dawn Chorus sound like a band who are prepared to fight with the big boys.

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