Album Review: Shallow Bed by Dry The River

Are you feeling dejected after wearing out your cherished Mumford & Sons album? 

Well, sigh no more: The marvellous debut from bucolic balladeers Dry The River surpasses it with ease.

The lucky few who witnessed the band’s barnstorming performance in St Andrews in 2010 knew that this would be a rather special record. The gorgeous, grandiose folk songs that they showcased in the Union deserved to be filling the uppermost rafters of an ornate cathedral that evening. Instead, their majestic compositions were hitting the low ceiling of a cramped bar, in a building designed by a concrete fetishist that has often been mistaken for a sixth form centre in the nuclear wasteland of Chernobyl. 

“I was lost in the fission before you came”, angelic lead singer Peter Liddle warbled during ‘The Chambers And The Valves’. After perusing the album’s lyric booklet, I realised that this phrase wasn’t improvised especially for the packed Union audience. Liddle mustn’t have noticed the similarity between his immediate surroundings and the desolate architecture of a Ukrainian town suffering the effects of chemical fallout. 

I’d been drinking my own volume in potent cider throughout the lively concert, as you should always do if you’re an inhibited and uncoordinated man who’d otherwise reel at embarrassing memories of a boisterous ceilidh. Therefore, I’ve forgotten much about the hours following. I imagine that I dreamed of developing advanced raffia basket weaving skills, steering a yoke of sturdy oxen while chewing on a long straw of wheat, or determining the most reasonable subscription package offered by ‘The Guardian’. Since then, I’ve been holding my breath for this album for so long that I’m now permanently encased in an iron lung. It wasn’t the ‘Shallow Bed’ that I’d hoped for. But it was a low-pressure solution to the affordable housing crisis in St Andrews.

‘Shallow Bed’ is a deceptively dull title for this collection of thrilling pastoral epics.
Therefore, I’ve decided to offer RCA, their record label, a selection of alternatives that’ll definitely give the band the massive commercial success that they deserve:

Option one: ‘40: An Album Very Loosely Influenced By The Discography Of Adele’
Option two: ‘Alas, A Creature I Don’t Know, I Speak Because I Cannot Swim’
Option three: ‘Noah On The Vale’
Option four: ‘Heath Ledger’

The fifth option, my favourite, will be revealed in the paragraph below. No peeking.

Even though it’ll be expensive for RCA to recall thousands of albums to carry out such a modification, I believe that it’ll pay dividends if branches of HMV are still selling music and not just ‘Hollyoaks’ calendars by the time that this highly necessary change is made. If you’re a person of exceedingly refined cultural taste and have already purchased these songs, please alter your iTunes library tags immediately.  Keep the original CD stashed away, of course. It’ll be worth a fortune when the ‘Arcadian Fire’ re-release outsells all other records in the history of sound combined.  

Dry The River’s members used to be in an assortment of hardcore punk bands, which explains the eruption of thundering instrumentation in ‘Shield Your Eyes’ and also why the heavily tattooed Liddle’s in drastic need of sharp scissoring near the scalp.
HOW DOES HE SEE?! This isn’t the forty-five minutes of fey, spineless whining that you’d usually expect to hear on a British folk album; the predatory shark pictured on the cover highlights that there’s slightly more bite to these songs lurking under the surface. Delicate, soothing melodies build to muscular, rousing crescendos, during which violin bows are raised and dragged faster than a transvestite who’s overslept after an inconvenient alarm clock malfunction. Luckily, despite his grittier sonic upbringing, Liddle’s remarkable falsetto acrobatics never deteriorate into awful, discordant caterwauling. As I’m afflicted with a jittery disposition, my frayed central nervous system was relieved that moments of demonic possession were minimised.

Mr. Liddle’s certainly a thoughtful young man. He studied social anthropology at Bristol and then started a medicine course at King’s College in London, and these years of voracious reading have filtered through into his intriguing writing. Your vocabulary will increase considerably after investigating his fascinating archaisms and peculiar biblical allusions. Amaze your friends with “astrolabe”, “corvidae” and “sorghum” during your next exhilarating Scrabble tournament! Then dodge their flurry of punches as they deride you for being insufferably pretentious! However, ‘Shallow Bed’ isn’t ‘The Wasteland’ with acoustic guitar strumming. Unlike Eliot’s abstruse poem, you don’t require an undergraduate degree in social anthropology and a postgraduate degree in medicine to comprehend the vast majority of Liddle’s lyrics.

Three other praiseworthy comments about the album, with touches of gentle criticism:

Distinguished producer Peter Katis has done a rather splendid job on the mixing desk. He’s recorded the vibrations on several of my favourite pieces of circular, playable plastic this millennium – Interpol’s ‘Turn On The Bright Lights’, The National’s ‘Boxer’, and Fanfarlo’s ‘Reservoir’, among others – and doesn’t disappoint here. The music sounds delightful throughout. However, after eighteen months of playing the band’s endearingly homespun demo versions, the sleeker, glossier arrangements are taking a while to get used to. This is my fault, not yours, Pete Kat. I still love you.

‘History Book’ is blooming lovely. You’ll struggle to find a better song this year.  Nevertheless, when Liddle trills “as heavy as a history book can be, I will carry it with me”, I doubt that he’s trudged a volume of the truly backbreaking ‘Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography’ across town. He needs to hold his tongue before making such sweeping statements. These bold words will come back to haunt him.

The track listing works well overall. My first quibble’s with the opener, ‘Animal Skins’, which is as bland as sawdust. I’ve put it on five times while writing this, but still can’t remember the tune. The luscious ‘New Ceremony’ would’ve been a more suitable hors d’oeuvre. Secondly, ‘Family Tree’ deserves to be featured outright rather than tacked on as a “hidden” track, which isn’t actually concealed if you possess iTunes and/or a brain. Finally, ‘Night Owls’ shouldn’t have been omitted, mainly on account of its brilliant lyric “you can tell your furious father he can have my guts for garters if he likes”. Macabre references to stockings are sorely missed in twenty-first century popular music. Aside from these gripes, this is the type of album that you’ll want to savour from [near the] beginning to the very end. It’s a cohesive collection of heavily considered songs, which will reveal their charms after repeated listens, rather than, as is the upsetting norm nowadays, four floor fillers at the start with eight tracks of vapid dross included as an afterthought to occupy the remaining half hour. As my all-time favourite musician, the consistently outstanding tunesmith David Ford, said:

“Singles are the sluts of song. They give it up all too easily, desperate to be loved for just a moment, even if it’s all surface. They might be pretty sexy of an evening but rarely have anything to say in the morning.”

Liddle clearly has a message to convey, even if he shrouds it in recondite language, while Dry The River have a deluge of wonderful [sound] waves in their waterway.

Watch your tweed waistcoat-ed back, Mr. Mumford: there’re some talented new farmhands on the meadow who’re close to pinching your crown of elderflowers…

Several highly recommended albums if you like this sort of thing:

Admiral Fallow – ‘Boots Met My Face’

Broken Records – ‘Until The Earth Begins To Part’

Frank Turner – ‘Sleep Is For The Week’

Midlake – ‘The Trials Of Van Occupanther’