There is a particular kind of music that only makes sense after midnight, on an empty motorway, with the dashboard lights glowing and the rest of the world asleep. 'Tidal Machines', the third album from the Bristol trio Marrow Coast, belongs firmly to that category. It is a record of long, slow-building songs, hazy synthesisers and lyrics about distance, and it rewards being heard in precisely the conditions that make most music feel irrelevant.
The change of direction is striking. Marrow Coast's first two albums were bright, anthemic affairs, built around big choruses designed for festival fields, and they made the band a reliable fixture on summer line-ups. 'Tidal Machines' abandons almost all of that. The choruses have been replaced by long instrumental passages, the guitars by analogue synthesisers, and the tempo rarely rises above that of a steady walk. It is, in almost every way, a braver record than its predecessors.
The opening track, 'Services, 3AM', sets the tone. It begins with nearly two minutes of processed field recordings, the hum of a motorway service station, the clatter of a coffee machine, before a single synthesiser line emerges, then a voice. Singer Elin Parry-Obasi sounds exhausted and tender in equal measure, singing about a phone call she cannot bring herself to return. When the drums finally arrive, four minutes in, the effect is overwhelming.
Songs built from distance
Distance, both literal and emotional, is the album's great subject. Parry-Obasi wrote most of the lyrics during a year spent driving between Bristol and her father's home in the north of Scotland while he was ill, and the songs are full of road signs, lay-bys and radio stations fading in and out. 'Aberdeen Lights' is the centrepiece, eight minutes of slowly accumulating grief that ends not with a crescendo but with the sound of a car door closing.
I spent a year talking to my dad from the car because it was the only place I could be honest. These songs are what I said when he wasn't on the line.
Producer Kofi Lindahl deserves significant credit. He recorded the band live in a disused lorry depot outside Swindon, capturing the room's cavernous natural reverb and the occasional rumble of traffic from the nearby road. Rather than polishing these imperfections away, he has made them part of the texture, so that the album seems to exist inside a vast, dark space. On good headphones, the effect is enveloping, and slightly eerie.
Not everything works. The album's middle section drags slightly, with two consecutive instrumentals that feel more like atmosphere than songs, and fans of the band's earlier, sunnier work may find the whole thing a little unrelenting. There are no obvious singles, and radio programmers will struggle to find a three-minute edit of anything. But these are the costs of a band taking a genuine risk, and the rewards far outweigh them.
The closing track, 'Headlights, Home', offers something like resolution: a gentle, almost hymn-like song about arriving somewhere at dawn. After forty-five minutes in the dark, it feels like the first light through a windscreen. 'Tidal Machines' is not an album for every moment. It is an album for a specific, solitary hour, and for anyone who has spent that hour on a long road, it will feel like being understood. Four and a half stars.
