Sneaky, sneaky, sneaky. For fans of British progressive rock collective Big Big Train, the afterglow of the April 28 release of the group\u2019s latest album Grimspound<\/i> had just begun to fade when hints began to appear in June that the group might have a surprise up its sleeve. Sure enough, on June 21 the band shocked fans with the announcement of the two-days-later release of their second new album of 2017, The Second Brightest Star<\/i>. (The fact that they managed to get through all of the media promotion surrounding the release of Grimspound<\/i> without ever letting slip a hint of the existence of a second album is impressive.)<\/p>\n
The band\u2014Greg Spawton (bass), Andy Poole (acoustic guitar, keyboards), David Longdon (vocals, flute, banjo, etc.), Nick D\u2019Virgilio (drums, background vocals), Danny Manners (keyboards), Rachel Hall (violin, background vocals) and Rikard Sj\u00f6blom (guitar, keyboards, background vocals)\u2014appropriately refers to The Second Brightest Star<\/i> as a \u201ccompanion album\u201d to Big Big Train\u2019s recent, brilliant Folklore<\/i><\/a> (2016) and Grimspound<\/i><\/a> (2017). And indeed, it\u2019s clear from first glance at the track list that this is a sort of \u201codds and ends\u201d \/ \u201cclear out the closets\u201d collection picking up bits and pieces and threads remaining from the sessions that produced the prior two albums. <\/p>\n Given this outline, The Second Brightest Star<\/i> is inevitably a bit of a hodgepodge of songs and ideas, with four instrumentals among its eight core tracks, augmented by re-presentations of two songs from Folklore<\/i> with new instrumental introductions. As one might expect with a group that consistently delivers music of such high quality, though, a plate of leftovers from Big Big Train still makes for a delicious meal.<\/p>\n Opening the album, the melancholy midnight rumination \u201cThe Second Brightest Star\u201d takes a single line from the song \u201cGrimspound\u201d as a starting point for an entirely fresh Longdon tune about searching out and preserving connection in the modern world. Alternating vocal tracks with instrumentals, the band then moves into \u201cHaymaking,\u201d a sprightly, energizing Hall number whose title speaks directly to comments Spawton has made in recent interviews about the band\u2019s drive to \u201cmake hay while the sun shines.\u201d <\/p>\n The long-rumored Longdon-Spawton-Sjoblom collaboration \u201cSkylon\u201d\u2014first slated as the title track of an imagined EP of Folklore<\/i> leftovers that blossomed into the Grimspound<\/i> album, only to be squeezed out of that set as well\u2014is a pretty but rather somber bit about the 1951 Festival of Britain. It\u2019s apparent why it didn\u2019t fit onto either of the band\u2019s previous albums; it doesn\u2019t feel like a strong musical or tonal match for either. Plus, while it\u2019s an evocative song with a distinctly Gilmour-esque closing guitar solo, it doesn\u2019t feel more deserving than any of the tracks that beat it out for the previous two albums.<\/p>\n The next instrumental, \u201cLondon Stone\u201d is the original acoustic guitar intro Rikard Sj\u00f6blom wrote for Folklore<\/i>\u2019s \u201cLondon Plane,\u201d a piece that eventually swelled into the 15-minute epic \u201cA Mead Hall In Winter\u201d found on Grimspound<\/i>. This version, adding only piano flourishes from Manners, feels almost like an abandoned demo. \u201cThe Passing Widow\u201d is a tune written by Hall and sung by Longdon, telling the tale of runner and inspirational speaker Rosie Swale Pop MBE, who addressed her grief over her husband\u2019s passing by setting off to run 20,000 miles around the world. It offers pathos aplenty, though again it\u2019s easy to appreciate why this spare, self-contained song didn\u2019t quite fit into either of the group\u2019s previous releases.<\/p>\n Several tunes here, including \u201cThe Leaden Stour,\u201d feature Manners\u2019 rippling, elastic piano lines. \u201cStour\u201d is a Spawton piece about a section of a nearby river that may or may not be cursed, with black doings returning every century or so on its banks. In its fifth minute the band locks into an unusual-for-them jazz\/r&b theme with the horns and the rhythm section playing off one another, a tastefully executed piece of musical stretching-out. <\/p>\n The instrumental \u201cTerra Australis Incognita\u201d finds Manners expanding on themes found near the end of Grimspound<\/i> highlight \u201cExperimental Gentleman,\u201d a welcome assignment indeed, and a pleasant-enough bridge into the intriguing \u201cexpansions\u201d of previously released tracks \u201cBrooklands\u201d and \u201cLondon Plane\u201d from Folklore<\/i>.<\/p>\n The \u201cBrooklands\u201d sequence positions \u201cOn The Racing Line\u201d\u2014featured as a standalone instrumental on Grimspound<\/i>\u2014as an introduction to \u201cBrooklands.\u201d The thing is, they appear to have made the right choice the first time. The vibrant \u201cOn The Racing Line\u201d is an excellent piece of music all on its own, yet perhaps against expectations, when heard in conjunction with \u201cBrooklands,\u201d it extends the latter song without really improving it. <\/p>\n The \u201cLondon Plane\u201d sequence leaves a similar impression. Spawton\u2019s fresh introduction \u201cTurner On The Thames\u201d features motifs from the main body of \u201cLondon Plane,\u201d building into a swell of mellotron and violin that glides right into original song proper. It\u2019s a pleasant-enough addition, but again, is this \u201csequence\u201d better than the original song, or just longer? I tend to think the latter. <\/p>\n Closer \u201cThe Gentlemen\u2019s Reprise\u201d is a hot little nugget, a full-band jam on themes from \u201cExperimental Gentlemen\u201d that didn\u2019t make the final cut of the original song for reasons unknown. D\u2019Virgilio in particular is on fire in this 3:02 sequence, which also features some very pretty guitar and keyboard bits. The way it opens on the heavy side and eases down to a denouement toward the end suggests that it could have been an alternate ending to \u201cGentlemen.\u201d In any case, it again feels like the band made the best choice here, as \u201cExperimental Gentlemen\u201d is one of the strongest tracks on Grimspound<\/i> in part because it\u2019s a remarkably tight 10:01.<\/p>\n The latter three tracks aside, The Second Brightest Star<\/i> tends to emphasizes the more mellow, pastoral side of Big Big Train; there\u2019s not a lot in the first half of this release that one could call stirring. In fact, what this release suggests more than anything is, this band knows what it\u2019s doing and is willing to make the sometimes-difficult decisions necessary to arrive at the strongest versions of both their songs and the albums they end up on. In virtually every case, it\u2019s apparent why the new material found here didn\u2019t fit into the original Folklore<\/i> and Grimspound<\/i> releases, and only found a home here on this \u201ccompanion piece\u201d collection of outtakes. <\/p>\n The music is, as always, performed and produced with great skill and taste, and as a fan it\u2019s fascinating to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the creative process that ultimately brought us Folklore<\/i> and Grimspound<\/i>. Still, in the end this album is comprised of broadly related tracks and snippets that tend to prove the wisdom of the band\u2019s initial editorial decisions. It\u2019s the kitchen sink, really\u2014albeit a very nice<\/i> kitchen sink, one that any sensible person would want in their home. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":33207,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8052],"rating":[5615],"class_list":["post-45016","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-big-big-train","rating-rating-b"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=45016"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=45016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}