You have to love a bit of sonic tease. Okay, the first track drifts by innocently enough but soon you realise that you nearly a minute in to the second track and little apart from the building of hazy sonics has happened and you begin to wonder what this is all about. Then Follow Me Home slips into gear, punches the sky and you can’t help but get carried along with its anthemic and atmospheric ways. That’s how you get the listener on board.
But Harbor & Home are about much more than such sonic tricks and musical artifice and Hold On To Love is actually chock full of great songs, ones which seem to sit at the same point of collision between alt-rock, indie and folk as the likes of Noah and Whale or Mumford and Sons when they finally realised that you look cooler wielding an electric guitar than a mandolin.
Hold Me is a song either of those bands would have sold their original copy of Astral Weeks to have written, Rock Bottom is a blustery, bluesy, sky-scraping, sing-along, Lies a jaunty slice of indie-pop and the title track is a glorious, country-infused, genre-hopper.
A great album for sure, one which covers plenty of ground but which sounds wonderfully cohesive and co-ordinated too. Broad minded folk fans will appreciate their moves, indie kids will dig the grooves and pop fans will wonder where this band has been all their life!
