The World is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die - Always Foreign

Whilst Harmlessness was a grower, TWIABP's third album was far more instant and accessible. Harmlessness remains my favourite record (now, it took a long time to reach that status though), but I was a fan of this one from the off. The music is a lot poppier in places and the songs feel simpler in structure - few have multiple movements, but there are greater variations between the songs, rather than within them. That maybe doesn't sound that positive, but it all works well for them, much more-so that you'd expect.

The album starts gently, and The Future is an upbeat follow-up. It sets a tone for the album that lyrically is miles away from how it plays out - there's rarely anything heavy in the music, but the lyrics show the darker side, particularly in the back-half of the album with the trio of For Robin, Marine Tigers and Fuzz Minor. The middle of those three made it onto my end-of-year mixtape and has been played to death in the car (so much so I half expect it to go straight into Bosses Hang Pt3 by Godspeed, which was how I followed it up). I still love it - the marching drums and classic post-rock build-up/explosion full of horns.

I ordered this as soon as Banquet listed it on their website, along with a handful of other records and got it a week or so after it came out. It was definitely the first of that parcel I played and I still remember sitting down to play it. I was shocked that it was such an instant hit, but I'd been listening to Harmlessness so much since I'd finally got into it at the start of the year that I guess I was just primed for it. The record is a lovely splatter, as you can see below.

Format: 12", gatefold, picture sleeve
Tracks: 11
Cost: £19.65 new
Bought: Banquet Records website
When: 05/10/17
Colour: Transparent blue with green splatter
Etching: none
mp3s: download code

The World is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die - Between Bodies

First things first: I love this record. I love it for the music, for the bold statement it was, and that it worked. Expectations were ridiculously high after TWIABP released their debut full-length album Whenever, If Ever, and that was fair - it was a great album that culminated in the grandest moment yet. So how do you avoid the "difficult second album"? In this case, a mini-album collaboration with a spoken-word artist.

I remember playing the album with trepidation but being impressed from the first listen. Just afterwards I chatting to JT in Banquet, having noticed they'd just got it in stock, and found myself singing it's praises. I probably said something similar about what a wonderful way to avoid the "difficult second album" situation. I'm not sure whether other TWIABP fans get as much enjoyment out of this record as I do (and it's by-the-by really) but this and Harmlessness have become the albums I routinely play from their ever-increasing back-catalogue (Harmlessness was a grower, but this one was much more instant). It's fared well over the last four years, so I suspect I'll be enjoying it for some time yet.

Going back a bit, I was very excited when this record got announced - I'd seen TWIABP at Fest the previous Autumn and become a very big fan. I was pleased to see that a European distributer had got it's own pressing run of Between Bodies because it meant I wouldn't have to pay crazy shipping costs from the US. As a bonus result, I got the most limited pressing on half (ultra!-)clear, half black vinyl which looks excellent, especially alongside the rest of the artwork. As the label had a distro, I also ordered some other records they had, although one of the 7"s I ordered was no longer in stock, so I let them send me any 7" they wanted that cost the same amount (easier than doing a refund I figured). I was after a November Coming Fire 7" (that I've still not yet bought) but ended up with a 7" by a band called Clearer the Sky; more on that another time.

As I said at the start, the fact that this record works is noteworthy. Between Bodies could easily have sounded like a strange anomaly in their back-catalogue, but instead they created something that stands out and shows that, as a band, they can try new things and produce exciting music in whatever style they choose, something that shouldn't be taken for granted - a lot of bands would not have been so successful.

Precipice features only Chris Zizzamia's spoken-word vocals meaning that when David's voice appears at the start of Space Exploration to Solve Earthly Crises it is all the more unexpected. But before you can get too comfortable, we get both vocalists at the same time, layering their different styles brilliantly. If and When I Die is yet another curveball as it is so fast-paced on a record that is generally much slower and contemplative. Side B goes by pretty fast, as Lioness's dirge swiftly flows into Shoppers Beef with half a line of lyrics before the gentle guitar strum interrupts the soundscape, which then eventually increases to accompany David's vocals on $100 Tip; it's easy to mistake the three as one song. Autotonsorialist closes the album out as an almost post-rock number that could easily have gone on for twice as long. Perhaps leaving it so early was another intentional curveball rather than accidentally falling into the trap of closing every album with an epic sprawl.

Format: 12", poster
Tracks: 8
Cost: £12 new
Bought: Black Lake Records website
When: 23/10/14
Colour: Half clear / half black
Etching: Side A: "The distance between bodies" Side B: "Can't be measured in miles"
mp3s: Download code

The World is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die - Harmlessness

I had very high hopes for Harmlessness - I'd fallen in love with Whenever, If Ever and thought that Between Bodies was the perfect curve-ball to follow (how do you get round the "awkward second album"? Create something so far from what people were expecting that it simply isn't that). I ordered it straight away. However, on the first few listens, Harmlessness just didn't grab me. I played it a few times but nothing really stuck.

A few months later I decided to give the mp3s a listen at work and the album finally got stuck in my head. I played it again a couple of days later and again and then I couldn't get enough of it. I completely ignored it when it came to writing my 2015 End of Year List, but now it's one of my favourite albums of last year. The last few months have consisted of this album played very regularly.

Compared to their previous albums and EPs, there are fewer of the heavy moments and quirks but the feel of the band is still there - they still come across as the Godspeed of emo - daring and epic. I say this a lot, but there are highlight throughout the album, so I'm just going to list them:

You Can't Live There Forever is the gentle opener I wasn't expecting with lovely strings - it sets the album up perfectly but was probably also the thing that through me on those first few listens. January 10th 2014 was first song that really made an impression - I love the quick-paced life-story and the incredible female vocals that follow it for the rest of the song. The Word Lisa has a huge ending and the transition between Rage Against the Dying of the Light and Ra Patera Dance (with its short guitar solo and keyboard moment laced with strings) is seamless. Mental Health is beautiful and slow - nearly a ballad - whereas Wendover is the song that could most easily fit on an older album. Haircuts For Everybody is the most traditional emo song but also feels suitably huge when the soaring chorus kicks in. Side D then completes the album with the two longest songs - I Can Be Afraid of Anything and Mount Hum (which I truly hope is a Hum reference). The former has one of the albums most singable lines ("I really did dig my own hole") and explodes into a perfectly layered outro and the latter provides a wide-ranging closer.

All in all, I'm floored by this album. Listening to it now, I can't believe it took me so long to get into. I don't recommend TWIAB to many people (because I know the varied nature won't be everyone's cup of tea) but I've been recommending Harmlessness much more widely - the accessibility works in its favour but there's so much depth that the album is still growing on me; I didn't expect that to be the case. Even if they hadn't released Between Bodies, I think this album would have been the perfect cure to the "awkward second album". A magnificent album.

Format: Double 12", insert
Tracks: 13
Cost: £22 new
Bought: Banquet Records
When: 25/11/15
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

Deer Leap & The World is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die - Are Here to Help You

After I saw TWIABP at Fest in 2013 I decided to buy all the records I could from their merch stand. I'd been amazed by their debut full-length, Whenever, If Ever, for months by that point and it was never going to be quite so easy (or so cheap) so stock up on their music. One of those records was this split with Deer Leap.

I'd never heard of Deer Leap at this point, and I imagine they're in a lot of people's record collections because of this record. They're an interesting sounding band; there's that floaty Explosions in the Sky-style post-rock sound to their guitars but with some low-fi emo vocals going on too. It works, but I can't say it's blown me away; a year and a half later and I've not checked out anything else by them.

The TWIABP side is pretty much exactly what I expected and excellent for it. I Will Be Okay. Everything is a perfect example of a great TWIABP song - sing-alongs, crazy song structures with drops that come out of nowhere, shouty vocals layered on singing and a strange midi-solo. In fact, all four songs are pretty strong TWIABP songs; on other records they have a tendency at times to meander through some awesome moments without ever really forming "songs" in the usual sense, but here they all work as individual tracks as well as a whole. The ending to Wait... What? finishes the record in a suitably unexpected but excellent way.

Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 8
Cost: £6.30 new
Bought: gig
When: 31/10/13
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

The World is a Beautiful Place and I am No Longer Afraid to Die - Whenever, If Ever

The end is usually a bad place to start, but here I can't help myself. Getting Sodas couldn't be more perfect as a closer to Whenever, If Ever. I still remember the first time I heard the album and being left amazed at the end. I immediately played the whole album over again in the hope I could repeat the enjoyment. A closer should make you come away from an album feeling triumphant and like you've just listened to something special, and that's exactly the feeling that Getting Sodas cements for me. Everything comes together perfectly in that song and the build up leads to such a wonderful, explosive conclusion. It feels like everything, musically and thematically, was just a build-up for this moment.

Or at least that's what I took form it. Before Whenever, If Ever, I'd heard a few TWIABP songs here and there (a band whose name is so long even the acronym gets abbreviated) and enjoyed them. However, similarly to how I feel about a lot of Low songs, I felt the grand build-ups stopped too soon and I wanted them to go further. For me, Getting Sodas is to TWIABP what Nothing But Heart is to Low. Both are songs that I longed for, I never want to end but never fail to put a huge smile on my face.

The timing of this post seems appropriate too. Whenever, If Ever appeared on the internet in a slightly un-momentous way just before its release and Topshelf announced a stream on Bandcamp. I was just about to start my first job after graduating and decided to give the album a play one afternoon. A few weeks into my new job I played the album a few more times in my headphones when the office was a bit quiet and, for a while, it was my go-to streaming album at work. In October I finally saw the band at Fest and was suitably blown away by their live show. I bought all their EPs and received the LP for Christmas. I placed the album at number 2 in my albums of the year (it was a close fight between TWIABP, RVIVR and Restorations). Two days before I left the job I got last summer I was lucky enough to catch the band play in Banquet Records and The Fighting Cocks in the same evening. Then I left my job, moved to Oxford and started a new adventure. TWIABP, and this record, really covered that period of my life very neatly. I'll still enjoy it in the future I'm sure, but it's connected to that period of my life in so many ways it feels like a part of it.

So what of the rest of the record? It's all pretty good. After a gentle intro, Heartbeat in the Brain really kicks things off and Picture of Tree... and Gig Life are all excellent. And of course it ends on Getting Sodas, putting this incredible cap on those exciting moments that have just passed. The album feels short but there's so much crammed in. As for the pressing, I'm inclined to say that its the clear vinyl from the first pressing but it's hard to tell for sure. It looks pretty nice either way.

Format: 12", picture sleeve

Tracks: 10

Cost: free, new

Bought: Gift

When: 25/12/13

Colour: Clear

Etching: none

mp3s: Download code