Until June this year, Tall Ships were a band I'd simply heard of. I'd seen their name about the place and even had a song on a Big Scary Monsters sampler which I must have listened to, but not properly it seems. Anyway, that all changed when I saw them at Banquet's Big Day Out in the summer, where they were quite possibly the highlight of the day (Hundred Reasons were great, but the sound did them no favours).
They were the first band on but, due to an unnecessarily long ID-checking queue, they'd long finished by the time we got into the arena. Luckily enough they played a second set on the Fighting Cocks acoustic stage just before HR, during which they blew me away. The stage was essentially a gazebo with a PA, but that added to the excitement as they spilled out into the small but densely packed crowd of fans trying their best to hear. It was impossible to not enjoy the party they got going, especially as they climbed on top of whatever they could find and handed out instruments for the audience to play. The final sing-a-long was incredible, but at the same time felt like there was this private club that I hadn't been invited to (how did everyone know all the words?).
I left that day a new fan of Tall Ships and pre-ordered their album from Banquet with a ticket to see them at New Slang (hence missing out on the white vinyl). Whilst the next sentence is a bit negative, read on because it gets more positive. When I got home and played the record, I was massively underwhelmed; I'd been looking forward to the album so much after the BDO show but the ten songs I was now hearing didn't seem at all interested in jumping out at me and making me excited. However, I put the mp3s on my player and listened to it a couple of times whilst out and about. The epic closer Murmurations was the first one to really catch my ear and make me think again about the album. The build-up is brilliantly gentle and the eventual group-vocals and simple lyrics are perfect. It might just be one of the finest songs I've heard all year. Since then I've grown to love T=0, Ode to Ancestors and Books too (the last of which made it onto my ATP mixtape swap cds). Now that I've properly got into the album, it's on pretty heavy rotation.
I'm fairly sure that if I see Tall Ships again I'll come to love these songs even more, but I've had a run of bad luck in catching them since June: after getting the New Slang tickets I realised that was the same night as The Cut Ups' first London show in years (and they had to take priority) and I had horrendous man-flu when Tall Ships played XOYO in October. Still, hopefully I'll be free of excuses when they play the Scala in March.
Format: 12", picture sleeve, 20"x15" poster insert
Tracks: 10
Cost: £13 new
Bought: Banquet Records
When: 11/10/12
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code
