Fourteen Nights At Sea are a band out of time. This may sound like a criticism, but it’s not. Like their self-titled debut, second album Great North is an immersive experience in an age of tie-ins and highly-leveraged content delivery. The band makes no attempt to work around your schedule: They simply do what they do, at their own pace.
What they do is post-rock: Great floating drifts of the stuff. Gently picked guitar arpeggios, through to sweeping crescendos, with stately minor-key progressions throughout. Familiar? Yes. A tad predictable? Probably, yes. Thing is, just because Great North sticks to the script doesn’t mean that it’s not a very effective album.
Tracked live, Great North has the feel and the natural sense of space that such an approach offers, but without too much of a compromise on definition: The arpeggios glimmer, great sheets of reverb spread across the sound field, and bass and drums swell up from below as required.
All the elements are familiar, but more significantly, those elements are good. Fourteen Nights At Sea fill their songs with the right arpeggios, and the build to the right crescendos. Most importantly, the band don’t overplay their hand. They shy away from the “let’s all hit our distortion pedals at once and go crazy!” approach of bands like Explosions In The Sky and Mono, aware that such histrionics would diminish the hypnotic, tidal flow of songs like centrepiece Tired Hands (post-rock rule of thumb: the ten-minute song is always the centrepiece).
Great North won’t make sense on shitty laptop speakers while you’re doing a spot of cheeky Facebook stalking, and if you think that post-rock is a daggy stylistic ghetto, then Fourteen Nights At Sea won’t be able to bring you round. You get the sense that this doesn’t bother them in the slightest, though.
BY EDWARD SHARP-PAUL
Best Track: Tired Hands
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In A Word: Oceanic
