The Blue Aeroplanes – “Silver Lounge” [Video]

Fire Track · ArtStar Records

The Blue Aeroplanes Return With the Wonderfully Unhinged “Silver Lounge”

Beloved Bristol art-rockers announce their 14th album Tales From The Silver Lounge, out November 27 via ArtStar Records, with a title track that makes an entire universe out of a John Byrne painting.

There is no band quite like The Blue Aeroplanes, and “Silver Lounge” is a useful reminder of why that matters. Four decades in, Gerard Langley and company are still making guitar-driven, sprechgesang-laced art-rock that sounds like nothing else in the British indie tradition, and their 14th album Tales From The Silver Lounge arrives November 27 via ArtStar Records with all their signature energy intact. The title track is two minutes and twenty seconds of thrilling, slightly deranged pop built around a John Byrne painting of a long-closed café on Paisley High Street. Leave it to The Blue Aeroplanes to turn an exhibition catalogue discovery from a hospital stay into a whole interplanetary mythology.

The album was recorded at Bristol’s Humm Studios in two intense sessions, and it features the band’s current line-up essentially unchanged for fourteen years. Langley has described that continuity as near-telepathic, and you can hear it in the music: the rhythmic interplay between three electric guitarists, Chris Sharp’s bass, John Langley’s drums, and the recurring presence of Wojtek Dmochowski’s dance as a performing element. The album roams freely through name-doppelgangers, falconry terms, Don Marquis, Greek mythology, abandoned Teslas, First World War ghosts, and a factory full of dismembered dolls. A typical Blue Aeroplanes record, in other words, which is to say: unlike anything else.

The album’s origin is personal as well as fictional. During hospital stays in recent years, Langley found himself deep in exhibition catalogues, and the Byrne painting of the Silver Lounge—its imagined clientele, its faded glamour—became the organizing image for most of what follows. That painting now hangs in his living room. The album closes with “Apostrophe Catastrophe Apostrophe,” which Langley singles out as a showcase for just how well this band knows each other. Long-time fans take note. New listeners: start here.

Pre-Order Tales From The Silver Lounge ↗

1Silver Lounge

2Going To Heaven In A Handcart

3Soap Star

4We Must Stop Meeting Like This

5The Post-War Occupation Of Jealous Town

6Billy McCrae

7Make Something Happen

8Give Her The Bells And Let Her Fly

9Doll Parts

10Birds And Snakes

11Apostrophe Catastrophe Apostrophe