Lau will play Rockwood Music Hall on Sept. 19.
By Colleen Taylor
The new album from Lau celebrates two cities that are not, technically, their home turf. Although they hail from Edinburgh, Lau’s fourth studio album pledges itself to a sister city. The album was commissioned for a festival celebrating Glasgow, and the title, “The Bell that Never Rang,” references that city’s coat of arms. However, a second urban influence also crept into the album’s making: none other than our own Big Apple.
Time spent in New York by the band – which have Irish family roots, sing Irish songs and are very popular in Ireland – inspired them to pay similar musical tribute to the American urban hub, to let their love of the city’s eclectic mix of artists, images and sounds blend with the their own Scottish musical tradition of which Lau are the master.
As band member Martin Green explained, “The Bell That Never Rang” traces a geographical circle. “The starting point was Glasgow,” he said, and the commission for the festival. But it was New York that made the album come to fruition. In 2014, the three musicians, Green, Kris Drever and Aidan O’Rourke, took a trip to New York in 2014, and experienced all the city has to offer together as a unit in shared enthusiasm and spontaneity. In Green’s eyes, the trip was a formative moment for the band’s dynamic. That time spent in New York, Green says, “unified us as a band. There’s something about going through these experiences together.” And experience New York Lau certainly did. The three musicians tried to absorb as much of the city’s music and art as humanly possible. They saw classical musicians, jazz, visited MOMA, went to esteemed music clubs, and even—at the last minute—decided to see Lady Gaga onstage. Green laughed remembering that the audience at the Gaga concert proved as entertaining as the live show: “I saw a guy in a toga—it’s not like that where I live.” All the excitement around these disparate and thrilling experiences built up into a momentum that produced “The Bell that Never Rang.”
Green wasn’t sure that any direct musical influence from New York had made its way into Lau’s album. He chalked it up more to an experiential influence, rather than a musical one. But, from the listener’s perspective, I might have to disagree. I hear something different in “The Bell That Never Rang” that wasn’t there before with Lau. There is an element of the dramatic, the theatrical, even a bit of a soft rock vibe in tracks like “Tiger Hill,” for instance. You might even hear something of a pop element alive amidst the traditional fiddles and accordions.
In fact, Lau had to learn a whole new genre of music in recording this album. For the titular track on the album, “The Bell that Never Rang,” Green, Drever, and O’Rourke adopted a new method of playing, one that matched a more classical style. The Elysian Quartet, who they play with on the track, taught them new techniques, often taking the lead on the collaboration. Green explained that Lau wanted to dive headfirst into this experimental track: “We didn’t want to just do a folk group backed by a quartet, so instead we wrote the music with them.”
The thematic urban influence of “The Bell That Never Rang,” the imaginative trip it makes across the Atlantic, from Glasgow to New York, climaxes with the final track, “Ghosts,” written by Drever and praised by his colleague Green. The song provides a poetic, musical reflection on emigration, which is elegiac and poignant. The song is as hypnotic as it is haunting.
After such an inspirational trip together two years ago, Lau is looking forward to a cyclical American return and promoting the album in the States. They are excited to experience Boston and New York together as a band, to see old friends in Boston and play a session or two. As part of the tour, Lau will play Rockwood Music Hall on Sept. 19. See if you can hear something of the “city that never sleeps” in Lau’s vibrant album, or, better yet, at their live show at Rockwood Music Hall. More information at lau-music.co.uk
