out now: Sixtoes - The Morning After [Toe Music]

Artist:
Sixtoes

Title:
The Morning After

Label:
Toe Music

Cat#:
tba

Release Date:
16th June 2014

Format:
CD, cassette, download & streaming

Tracklist:
01.
Intro

02.
Pedestal

03.
The Morning After Melodrama

04.
Zen Box

05.
Low Guns
[feat. Dave Gahan]

06.
Volume Song

07.
Nobody Inn

08.
The Russian Song

09.
Hawthorns

10.
The Welcoming

Press Info:
For SixToes, retreating to Norfolk from the city to record their second album wasn’t an act of escapism. Splitting their work between a barn there and the New Forest, The Morning After on the one hand is a record that built on the warmth of strings, acoustic guitars and other lush folk instrumentation; yet where their peers are sometimes content to push those ends to a tourist board image of Britain’s green and pleasant lands, London-based SixToes instead see the bleakness between the hills, revel in the darkness of the woods. Featuring breakout single ‘Low Guns’ – with vocals from Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan – The Morning After has a bittersweet taste that suggests a coming of age, a loss of innocence.

More stately and cinematic than the comparative playfulness of 2008 debut Trick Of The Night, SixToes have taken their city turmoil with them to East Anglia, with the group’s Ben Rogers saying of The Morning After “It’s the processing, lamentation, reconciling and celebration of many years of disparate relationships and experiences, living in London. The boy on the record’s cover with the white rabbit represents to me the edge of adolescence and the tipping point.” Songs deal in one on one relationships, making the most of break-ups, falling outs and, on ‘Hawthorns’ harrowing peak, deals with a daughter’s abusive relationship with first her father then spouse.

Six years in the making, The Morning After’s lengthy gestation period has partly been down to the group expanding to six members, while they’ve also spent time working with Josh T Pearson and Soulsavers, as well as remixing for the likes of Grinderman and Depeche Mode. It was through that the association with legendary vocalist Gahan came about, on the rousing melancholia of ‘Low Guns’, a song described by David Greenep cryptically as “a snapshot in time”. Anne Carruthers says “Gahan would always let us know just how much he liked our remixes and so we decided to see if he’d be up for being involved in one of our songs. He was really keen, and did an amazing job…even recording some harmonica on the end of the track”.

‘Low Guns’ is a good jump-off in fact, in showing just how working in the quiet of the countryside influenced SixToes. Initially starting as a string-only piece, the group spent every day while putting it together while looking out onto a dark and still heathland, something Carruthers says “definitely inspired the slow minor development of it.” That stillness allowed the group to focus their minds collaboratively on expanding their sound, with songs flitting from up close, claustrophobic folk tales, like ‘Nobody Inn’, out to more expansive ‘Zen Box’, which sees Greenep’ vocals reach soaring falsetto amidst a plume of strings. “When you’re in the country your state of mind is much more relaxed and less interrupted by everyday things that you can’t escape when in London,” Carruthers explains. “So I guess the surroundings helped put us in a much more creative mind set.”

Elsewhere the group show that they haven’t abandoned the sense of joy that musically gave their debut record such a lift; ‘Volume Song’ shuffles along on a mid-West country rhythm, gently pushing the song this way and that; ‘The Morning After Melodrama’ – with lyrics written in the style of Its second generation populist romantic poet Longfellow no less – dances and jinks with an effortless grace. Truly isolated during the period of making the record, each track is imbued with a sense of a certain place and time that retains a deep personal connection to the group; unwilling to compromise, SixToes’ control over their vision goes write down to mixing the finished record, as well as self-releasing it. The Morning After has certainly taken a while, but it comes blinkingly out from the long night the presaged it, a mature second album from a group who’ve learnt that you carry your scars with you wherever you go, and that the best way to deal with them is to face them head on.

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