Amateur Ornithologist – “The Haunted Life of Architecture”

Amateur Ornithologist is a weird pop band from North East England, and their new album The Haunted Life of Architecture is exactly the kind of record you don’t hear enough of these days. The album came out of a week the band spent in the Welsh countryside, walking around hill forts, cathedrals, and graveyards near a cottage overlooking medieval castle ruins. You can hear all of that in the record. Not in a heavy-handed way, but in the way a place can get into your head and color everything you write for a while.

The album pulls from a lot of directions. There’s gothic post-punk in there, some indie folk, chamber pop, art-rock. The band plays a mix of pop and orchestral instruments anywhere from four to seven musicians at a time, and the arrangements here are the most ambitious they’ve put together. Personal favorites for me are “Swing Around” with its four-minute-plus runtime that never outstays its welcome, “Lament” which takes its time at 4:45 and earns every second, “Rituals,” and “Kiss the Stones”. Those four alone give you a good sense of how much range this album has.

If you’ve followed them since Hide, this one goes further. Worth your time to sit with it properly, not just have it on in the background. Give them a follow on social media and keep an eye on what they do next this year.