FEATURE: Guillemots

“It just felt like there was a lot of ancient wisdom in the air — it really had something about it.”

British four-piece Guillemots have built a reputation for making grown men weep with their warm indie-rock instrumentals and frontman Fyfe Dangerfield’s sweet voice, often singing of romantic dramas.

“There’s a man with a face like sorrow, now he’s gone for good, how could anyone hold you without feeling good,” he sings on Vermillion, one of the stand-out tracks off third album Walk the River.

Recorded in a studio in the woods of Snowdonia, Wales, there couldn’t have been a more picturesque location to bring their new songs to life.

“It’s kind of impossible not to be influenced by your surroundings especially when they’re so beautiful,” the charismatic Dangerfield says on the phone from his flat in London.

“It just felt like there was a lot of ancient wisdom in the air — it really had something about it. We only did a few weeks there and the rest we had to do back in London, but I think the atmosphere in that place totally permeated the whole sessions really.”

While their last album, 2008’s Red, was criticised for being too eclectic and poppy, Walk the River is more intensive and requires a focused listen.

“I think it’s the most intense record we’ve done,” Dangerfield says. “I think I only appreciated that fully when we finished it. I wouldn’t say it’s typical of the direction we’re going in but we try not to get too much in the way of the songs and it just felt like that was what was coming out.”

Even though Dangerfield went off and released a solo album last year called Fly Yellow Moon, the Guillemots never really took a break and a defining factor of this record was they knew how to play most of it before heading into the studio.

“We had most of the songs pretty nailed and they didn’t change much in the studio but there were definitely some that developed and grew,” he explains.

“We’d been working on these songs as a live band — that was quite important to us, that we were going into the studio expecting to be able to play a whole new live set of songs; whereas on the last record we were writing as we went along.”

Dangerfield goes on to discuss the difference between “produced” records and those where the recordings are almost like live performances. Walk the River falls somewhere in the middle.

“It was a key thing that we kept some of those moments of spontaneity,” he explains. “On songs like Vermillion, we built it over a demo I’d done at home where I was just singing into my computer microphone and playing the guitar at the same time, just recording it before I forgot it.

“We were like ‘We should use that as the main vocal and not replace it’; so keeping those moments so music can breathe. It gives it so much more life sometimes than to try and effect them too much in the recordings.”
RACHEL DAVISON