Many bands have stumbled when working with a big-name producer, but Foo Fighters/Pixies man Gil Norton has kept Stornoway’s folksy charm intact while making their third album sound appropriately expansive. Writing the songs in a storm-lashed camper van on the Gower peninsula, frontman Brian Briggs has audibly been inspired by the environmental and elemental. Bonxie features the calls of 20 different bird species, while the songs upliftingly talk of “great, grey skies on the great, grey ocean” and being “lifted to a higher plane”. It also brings a classic 60s pop sensibility to the band’s alt-folk, and to Briggs’s hymnal vocals. Love Song of the Beta Male is a head-rushing, wonderfully observed tale of romantic clumsiness, while The Road You Didn’t Take captures the intense joy of being on top of the world: “Get high up on the mountain / Feel your lungs start burning as you run.” It amounts to Stornoway’s best work yet: big music, which deserves the largest stage.
