“It’s the quiet ones you’ve got to watch,” sings Olly Knights during Turin Brakes’ ninth album. “When you’re asleep, we’re waking up / You roll the dice, we write our luck.” Long-term organisation and getting out of bed before 7am are not traditionally rock’s raunchiest lyrical themes, but coming from the nice blokes from the “New Acoustic Movement”, a track such as The Quiet Ones sounds like a knowingly arch reference to their roots. The genre, which championed quiet complexity over loud brashness – moments before Coldplay, Adele and Ed Sheeran eclipsed the musical landscape with their New Boring – is often regarded with sneering disdain, but Turin Brakes’ combination of pedestrian sentiment with softly stirring melodies and dusty Americana remains neither bland or benign (apart from on the overly sentimental Jump Start and Save You). Fifteen years since their debut, Turin Brakes’ tangled, twisty take on acoustic rock sounds confident rather than beleaguered or battered by age.
