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Review: Dry The River – Alarms In The Heart

★★★★☆
Four Stars

The journey of Dry The River’s second album from the studio to your ears has been a rocky one. In early 2013, it seemed as if the essence of the band might have frozen in the wilderness of Iceland where they spent some months.

However, in June 2014, they returned with ‘Gethsemane’, a mournful, beautiful, and powerfully poetic plea, filled with biblical and literary references which reflect the fierce intelligence that Dry The River have always proudly exhibited. The song has been a live staple for more than a year, along with ‘Roman Candle’, but an album just refused to form around them.

The band suffered through this creative drought, even doubting that the record would ever be released at all. Will, the violinist, jumped ship.

But eventually, Alarms In The Heart has emerged, showcasing for a second time all of Liddle’s lyrical skill and reeling off the quasi-religious, half-folk-half-heavy-rock ballads.

‘Gethsemane’ is a track of undeniable brilliance, with every line a gem of poetic genius. What other band today is producing lyrics like ‘excavating down you’d find the drowning and the drowned / And then there’s us babe’. This is a song that could be read as poetry, but the musicality should not be ignored. Dry The River execute their traditional movement from quietly crooned lyrics over softly-plucked guitar to crashing guitar chords and (if you’ve seen them live) a veritable whirlwind of sweaty hair.

The other lead single, ‘Everlasting Light’, is the song that Dry The River say represents their path out of the wilderness. Indeed it is a departure from something, but if it’s the way out of the wilderness, the band might have been better off staying there. While it’s a perfectly decent tune, with a solid chorus and a nice tune, Shallow Bed it is not.

The whole album nudges Dry The River slightly closer to a more conventional indie rock sound, where some might have hoped that they would take the opportunity to explore some of their more interesting aspects – the harmonizing beauty of a song like ‘Shaker Hymns’ had so much space in which to expand, and yet Alarms In The Heart seems like more of a constriction.

That said, it is still a solid album with some very good songs, and Liddle’s songwriting remains excellent. Plus they’re local boys. I’m still a fan.

Listen to the album over at Sound Check.

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