Adventure Over Academia
London’s Another Sky uses chamber-inspired melodies and soaring choruses to evoke forgotten memory and pluck at the heartstrings like they were made of catgut. This is not a far cry from about a thousand other bands who do similar things, from the often hushed and choral tones of Grizzly Bear to the quiet storm of Home-era Peter Broderick or the deceptively gritty sunshine-through-the-hail conjured by a band like Antlers.
What Another Sky has crafted here is similar to all the above…but it’s also the farthest thing away from being “the same.” I Slept On The Floor defies attempts to shoehorn its scope into anyone else’s paradigm and it benefits greatly from setting its own terms.
Perhaps no band mirrors the dynamic of Another Sky quite as well as North Carolina’s Lost In The Trees. Both write dense and delicate ballads, though the British outfit does manage to fit a larger ratio of stompers to non-. Both feature a vocalist who comes to the party with earnestness galore and a penchant for oversharing; both of their vocal styles include the proclivity to switch on a dime from low murmurs to raging higher registers. In other bands with a frontperson this talented at quickly shifting gears volume can become a weapon, the switch on a detonator - once flipped, it decimates everything around it. Another Sky finds the space to instead hug that vocal hugeness back into the soundscape, enveloping it in a way that is surely meant to be a comfort…but is the comfort for the band, or for us?
Bands who navigate with these maps tend to keep their songs in the drawing room, or at least not stray far from those woodgrain interiors. They can seem content in the whiling away of hours for the sake of it, regretting lost opportunities and divining the wonders of a future that is as uncertain as it is nigh. Another Sky is a band unafraid to leave those cloistered rooms and musty staircases, they spend much of their time surrounded by sheer cliffs and deep quarries, the poptimism of their massive hooks becomes a shield against inclement weather and misfortune. They are adventurers in that way more than they are academics - journeys come to mean more than the learning. Coded half-truths and visible growing pains make this debut album an odd animal, one that bucks against classification in some respects and bows to it in others.
The group’s de facto leader Catrin Vincent has proven to be a formidable voice within just the twelve songs here (to say nothing of a smattering of other singles and EP’s that came before). Her voice is a dual threat as well, beautifully uncanny in the aural and aesthetic senses but also effortlessly devastating in the lyrical one. Above the fray of lofty and reaching indie pop, Vincent and company carve a space for a more nuanced and comprehensive approach to not only explaining the human experience, but to helping humans live in that experience.
Top Photo: Parri Thomas