Mull Historical Society: This Is Hope on CD

Mull Historical Society
This Is Hope Distributed by
B Unique

Year: 2004
Rating: 9/10
Cat. No: BUN082

Track listing:

I am hope. You are hope. We are hope. This is hope!

And so, This Is Hope, the third album from Hebridean eccentric Colin MacIntyre, AKA the Mull Historical Society begins. He certainly has a lot of expectations to live up to: after selling nearly 100,000 copies of his splendid debut, Loss, then following it up with an album of perfect indie-pop, the acclaimed Us, not to mention having been signed to new label B-Unique, the pressure must really be on him.

The first track proper, Peculiar, is in name as in nature. It’s about a ‘crazy guy’, who met a ‘crazy girl’, who had a ‘crazy son’ and then: it turned out OK, he went crazy again. In places, it also sounds as though the record is skipping; but then, MacIntyre didn’t get where he is today by not using oddball sound effects. The song eventually morphs from third into first person: I’m not cool any more: stay with me honey, with a ‘la la la la’ upbeat singing voice (MacIntyre’s own) just below in the mix.

Next comes lead single, and surprise Top 40 hit, How ‘Bout I Love You More. MacIntyre pioneered this track at last year’s Reading and Leeds festivals. It’s a joyously upbeat, perfect indie-pop single that bemoans digital culture – “Why have we got to try?/ Time’s on our side/ In these mechanical times“. It ends with a piano/violin part, which is the perfect end to a perfect single.

Next up is the piano-driven lament Treescavengers. This contains the first reference to his homeland: “there’s quiet coming from Scotland”. But it’s not so much an ode to his homeland, as a beautifully orchestrated hymn to internal self-destruction, as the 3rd verse shows: “What’s happened in your life?/ Walls of skin cannot hide/ Afraid of what lies inside/ Hope took a chance but didn’t bite”. This is followed by another downbeat song; unlikely to be a single, but very good indeed – another home-referencing song: This Is The Hebrides. This is, seemingly, MacIntyre having a go at American culture. Once again, it’s got a perfectly written piano line, and once again, it verges on lyrical genius: “They found the killer, she prayed on the weak/ America is pulling the headlines out of me”, or “Europe is falling and I’d strike for anything/ Millipedes racing down America’s skin”

Very good indeed. Track 6, Tobermory Zoo is a fast moving guitar-driven song about knowing “a man with the world in his hands who knows where we stand”. What it’s about is not clear, but what is clear is a reference to a song on Loss, eponymously titled. The line is “Come on and join up if you can”, wheras the line in Loss’ Mull Historical Society was “c’mon and join us, join us now”

The last song in this series of four (having begun with Treescavengers), which have been very much like the moody parts of Radiohead’s last three albums, only in a more accessible way, is Death Of A Scientist (which is actually named as Death O£ A Scienti$t (A vision of man over machine, 2004)’). It’s clear that this is MacIntyre’s ode to Dr. David Kelly, the government scientist of recent news. It starts off with quite a dirge-y verse: “A simple accident of fate/ A quiet hero made a mistake/ I’m the fall guy who fell away”, but then it goes really quite strange (as did the lead single from Us, The Final Arrears, as it approached its fourth minute): “It’s funny before I lost my control I had clarity love is clear and gentle” – it’s practically a stream of consciousness.

The next verse contains the killer line “I used to know a man who burned his silly skin against the state”, before the string section of the year kicks in. As the song enters its fourth minute, a church organ and brass band kicks in, before MacIntyre dramatically screams ‘aaaaaah’. It quietens down again for a moment, and then a sample of the Gloucestershire news program kicks in. It exerts even more pressure into and out of the song: it’s urgent, but slow at the same time. The song’s final two minutesare MacIntyre claiming “tonight I’ll fight for this life… and clocks tick and transport clucks, and blood still flows around bodies”. It’s a song similar to MacIntyre’s previous political statements: “Barcode Bypass” (about a supermarket which puts a cornershop out of business, and the corner shop owner takes an overdose – admittedly an oblique reference, but it works), and Minister for Genetics And Insurance M.P. – a song about a depressed M.P..

As that song ends, you practically feel like you are driving past a sign: “You are now leaving the expermental phase…”, which is a shame, because it’s begun to grow pon you. No worries, as MacIntyre follows with two brilliant pop-songs – Your Love, My Gain and Casanova At The Weekend, the latter of which is as darkly perky as anything the Society has ever recorded. Following on, is My Friend The Addict, which eventually gets the mysterious instrumental that the title suggests it should have, but not without surprisingly upbeat choruses and Coldplay-esque verses.

And then there’s Len – another song which is upbeat on the exterior, but it talks about having “done nothing wrong on a world scale” – suggesting that a) whoever Len is, he’s not as bad as those who do something wrong on a world scale (given MacIntyre’s earlier statements on the record, this is perhaps George W. Bush), or b) that it’s alright to do something wrong, as long as it’s not too bad, which would be a delicious stroke of irony given that this is the most experimenetal Mull Historical Society album so far.

We end with In The Next Life (A Requiem), a grandmother-sampling ode to “the end” – one assumes the end of life. If this song fears death, then the instrumentation certainly does a good job of hiding it – a simple piano riff is joined eventually by a happy drum beat, all the while the New Orleans Singers wait in the wings, knowing that they could join the song at any moment.

This certainly isn’t the same Mull Historical Society as on the last two albums, but times change. This is a brilliant record in many ways. Experimental yes, but something did have to be done. Whilst MacIntyre was creating some of the best records of the decade, he wasn’t selling many. Hence a change of label, and a slight change of direction. There’s enough here for long-term fans, as well as enough to sell a fair few records to new fans whilst at it. It’s also a great record musically. Some might say over-produced, but that is the beauty of Mull Historical Society’s charm using a variety of instruments to the advantage of his records.

It certainly is a fantastic album.

[Up to the top of this page]

Dom Robinson

Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.

DVDfever.co.uk

Follow DVDfever.co.uk