Midlake’s new record “The Courage of Others” has been named album of the month in MOJO music magazine this month. “The Courage of Others” will be in stores on Monday 1st February.

It’s ironic that Midlake’s new album is titled “The Courage Of Others” because, if anything, the courage is all theirs. Namely, the courage to do what feels right and stay true to the spirit of artistic independence whilst ignoring any pressure to conform to expectations. The result is the Texas quintet’s third album, their most complete and beautiful body of work yet, best appreciated as a whole in the old-fashioned sense of an album - which makes perfect sense when you know Midlake linchpin Tim Smith’s fondness for the look and feel of past times. 

So what’s changed since The Trials of Van Occupanther, their second, hugely loved breakthrough album? Just as that record was in part inspired by the soft(er) rock of the early-to-mid 1970s – from Neil Young and America to Fleetwood Mac – so Midlake’s new album turns to a slightly earlier, and definitely British, trad-tainted folk sound. It may share the same gorgeously analogue-warm electro-acoustic template as Van Occupanther but it’s a slower, darker and more carved record, both eerier and dreamier. Perfect, in other words, for its February release date, at the height of winter.

Neither do the new songs feature any hermit-scientists like Van Occupanther, or the mythical Roscoe. The songs that constitute The Courage Of Others, Tim says, are closer to his heart than those of their first two albums because, “I don’t feel I’m looking at the songs through someone else’s eyes. I’ve tried to keep it as true to myself as I could.”

It was in the process of testing new equipment for their Denton studio that Tim was encouraging the band to imbibe the sound and vision of folk-rock icons such as Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span… As guitarist Eric Pulido adds, “We didn’t want to make the same album as Van Occupanther, so we carried on moving and creating and pushing for a newer sound and emotion.”

‘Acts Of Man’ opens the album with an exquisitely fragile mood framing Tim’s admission, “and when the acts of man cause the ground to break open / Oh let me inside, let me inside not to wake.” The feeling of wanting to escape modern trappings, whether it’s via the innocence of childhood or the simplicity and slow pace of agricultural ways before industrialisation pervades The Courage Of Others. No wonder Brit trad-folk resonates so strongly for Tim.

But it’s not all wintery resignation. Next up is ‘Winter Dies’, which heralds not just the renewal of spring but also the guitars that shape the album. Other highlights include ‘Fortune’, the album’s most purely acoustic ballad, ‘Rulers, Ruling All Things’, which features a baroque arrangement of horns while ‘Bring Down’ (with Stephanie Dosen on guest vocals) and ‘The Horn’ share the same intensely moving DNA. Finally, there’s ‘In The Ground’, which closes the album in typically dark, minor-key mood but with another note of optimism, that nature hopefully endures (“From her wounds, from her sighs / And she’ll try mending all she can”).

“The Trails of Van Occupanther”, Midlake’s breakthrough second album, was one of the most acclaimed releases of 2006 and one of the slow-burning success stories of the following year with the band selling out Shepherd’s Bush Empire in early 2007 and having now sold 50,000 albums in the UK to date…