Beautiful Hell, ahab's new album

In terms of being unemployed in Hackney on a weekday afternoon this was a bit like winning the lottery. There was (a) a copy of ahab's forthcoming new album, called Beautiful Hell, sitting on the pub picnic table in front of me and (b) Dave Burn getting increasingly slurry and whimsical on the other side of it.

Over the course of a few messy and hilarious hours given in the service of this blog - it's a tough job etc - several things lodged themselves in the increasingly mushy folds of my mind. Firstly, ahab is a man down this time around.

Callum Adamson, of the 12-string guitar, has departed. This is because his partner has had a baby and the line is that he needs to make a more stable home for his family than is presently possible as a musician playing Americana - however brilliantly - in a country that isn't the US. Since I, coincidentally, saw him disappearing into the office of a media company on Dean Street in Soho earlier this month - his day job has always been in digital media - it looks as if the plan may be working out.

"He's still on the books and he's got writing credits for the album. But I don't know whether he's coming back," said Burn, who along with Luke Price and Seebs Llewellyn, is the remainder of the song-writing quartet.

Secondly, the album cover bears a picture of a brothel in Spain taken by David Emery, a friend of the band, which is therefore also the significance of the the discarded mattresses on the slip, and was deemed appropriate subject matter for an album called Beautiful Hell.

"But don't mention that if you write something."

OK, Dave.

And third, ahab is having more and more trouble online over the fact that they share a name with a German doom metal band. This has potential for hilarity - the other band is very doomy - but it's also a marketing handicap in a small digital universe. "I've been in touch by email with them a lot," said Burn, "and it's all very amicable - I like their stuff. The trouble is that we both started out at roughly the same time and though we've tried to differentiate ourselves with upper and lower case letters, that doesn't always help and there's one new and important site - called Bands in Town - that keeps sending messages out to our fans saying that we're playing gigs in Germany."

He looked a bit glum.

"I don't know what's going to happen with that. I suppose it's possible that we'll end up having to change our name. Both bands seem to be doing OK..."

The response ahab gets online is strong - watch the avalanche of "likes" and comments pile up when they post something - so it would be a shame to have to take a step back, which is what a name change would involve, if they go properly global. And since there may be a US tour in the offing...

Which brings me to the album. On first listen I was inclined to think that without Adamson and John Leckie - who mixed their eye-opening KMVT EP in 2010 - there was a certain kick-arse quality that was missing. But I've actually changed my mind.

There's a sweetness to it that is a lot to do with Burn and Price's voices. But there's also enough dramatic light and shade - particularly toward the back end of the album - to make you want to listen over and over. The trick with a band that is as good as they are live, is punching that quality into the mix. I'm not sure they've quite pulled it off on this occasion. But the songwriting is as strong as ever and I'm looking forward to hearing it from a stage. Preferably a large one. This is a high quality album from a band with a lot of petrol in its tank.

Specifically In My Dreams feels like a departure, a kind of sweeping, 80s-themed reverie with a vein of synth running through it; while This War has a riff that could be a tribute to Big Country, a band buried deep in ahab's genetics.

Rescue Me - I think, it's not listed so let the CD run to the end - is my favourite track, megaphone hystrionics and all, and I can't find it yet online. Personally, I think the more stressed out and strung out they sound the better...

ahab deserves far more success than they've had so far - despite what sounds like several near-misses with the major leagues. I wonder whether a US tour will finally give them the oxygen they need?

* You can buy Beautiful Hell here and they kick off their UK tour in Southampton on October 1.

* If you'd like to read more about ahab there's this, about the first time I heard them, including an interview with Cal Adamson. And there's this about them and Show of Hands at the Bristol festival in 2012.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

ahab in a perfect storm

Seeing ahab on stage at the Wychwood festival the other weekend was a bit like watching the taper on a firework being lit. A really big firework.

Driving home, the CD on the car stereo was their EP, called kmvt. "Rumour has it that stands for 'kill my valour tonight'," said Cal Adamson, who plays 12-string guitar and bass. "Or it could be 'kiss me vile troubadour'." Ha ha. "Or kill my vintage tiger."

I couldn't decide by this stage whether he was being playful or irritating (because he was irritated with me). There had been an ambiguity during the interview because I'd learnt, while poking around on the net, that his father was the late Stuart Adamson, of Big Country, something that stunned me, because of his untimely death and because I own four Big Country albums, saw them play god knows how many times and know most of the words. 

But despite some fairly heavy handed prompting Cal had said nothing to address this. (Me: "You father's a musician then? Anyone I would have heard of?" Him: "No.") Awkward. On the one hand, why should he? ahab's four-part harmonies and Lyle Lovetty song-writing had hooked me without the back story, which I didn't discover until I'd already decided to write about them. But Nashville, where he spent time after his father moved there, is pivotal to the band's history, as well as their Americana sound, and my professional twitchiness and fear of seeming to have over-looked something important meant I couldn't not mention it. So: his dad was Stuart Adamson and he has a sister, who's also a musician. That's all. I'm sure he has his reasons for not wanting to talk about it.

Because ahab is interesting enough without the ghoulishness. It started with Adamson (left) and Dave Burn (second from right), when they were in their early 20s, five years ago. "I heard Dave open for the band I was with one night soon after I arrived in London and it was a case of 'he's great, my band's not'. Not a hard decision."

They came up with the name during an evening in an unfortunate hotel in Winchester. "Dave and I had gone away to write some songs. We got drunk, messed up a hotel room and re-enacted the scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in which Johnny Depp brandishes a curtain rail, saying 'Don't fuck with me now, man. I am Ahab.' There was £380 worth of damage."

Multi-instrumentalists Luke Price and Seebs Llewellyn joined when Adamson and Burn received an invitation from Nashville in 2009 to play at a festival. "We didn't want to be a quiet little folk duo - we wanted to make some noise. We spent two weeks over there and had a blast." 

Then when they got back they started busking on Brick Lane, soon getting into trouble with the police for drawing the kind of crowds that upset the local market traders' business. Then a video - possibly the one linked in the previous sentence - found its way to the organisers of the Cropredy festival, someone dropped out and they ended up playing to 17,000 people on the main stage last summer.

Bob Harris heard them and booked them to do a session on Radio Two. John Leckie, who was there to see Bellowhead, heard them and invited them to record with him, telling Navigator records that he had a band for them and they wouldn't be cheap for long. They also acquired a manager - Gareth Williams, who is Cropredy's festival director - a record label and a top-notch PR and agent - Stevie Horton at Iconic Media - as a result.

So now they're  surprisingly well tooled up, professionally speaking, for a band that has only had people paying to see them for around six months. Seventeen more festivals this summer should sort that out.  

Adamson says that the songs are a joint effort. "Someone brings a pick-up or a verse and then we all work on it. We're a very democratic bunch." If their drummer, Griz (or Graham, more prosaically), seems slightly semi-detached that might be because he has outstanding work commitments with Bonnie Tyler (!) 

They sing three-minute twangling Americana as if their lives depended on it, which in an understated sort of a way they do. Seeing them play the Scolt Head in Dalston last week - to check I hadn't imagined the whole thing - was odd because the audience was split between drunk youngsters shouting through the music and the slack-jawed and spellbound, who couldn't quite believe what they were hearing on a week night in a back room.

That's the point they're at. The fuse has been lit. But it has to be said that the odds are stacking up very substantially in their favour...

* Here's a post about ahab from the Cropredy festival in August.

* And another about borderline obsessive fandom from the Bristol festival in 2012.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley