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The most striking chorus on The Courage of Others, the third full-length album by indie soft-rock band Midlake, arrives stealthily, in a haze of petulance.
"I only want to be left to my own ways," declares Tim Smith, the band's lead singer and songwriter, like a precocious child from behind a closed door. The song is Rulers, Ruling All Things, and its harmonious purr, aflutter with flute and finger-picked guitars, creates a damp and cloistered feeling. You come away with the sense that Smith says this a lot and often gets his wish.
Midlake was formed just over a decade ago by jazz students at the University of North Texas. The band takes its time in all things. Smith, trained as a saxophonist, became a singer by default, picking up acoustic guitar along the way. He has gradually steered Midlake through its Crosby, Stills and Nash phase toward something more in line with Fairport Convention. Left to his own ways, he writes songs of stoic interiority: This album begins with a plea for hibernation and ends, approvingly, with a burial.
Sylvan and solemn, gorgeous and a little listless, The Courage of Others feels like the sincerest kind of put-on. For a band still based in Denton, there's an awful lot here about wintry privations, maidens, servants and lords. One song in 6/8 meter, Core of Nature, borrows its title from a passage in a Goethe poem. Another, Bring Down, affirms these musicians' infatuation with the Radiohead of their late-teenage years.
But there's a strong presence to the album, with its meticulous atmosphere and granite consistency of tone. The chiming guitars of a pair of Erics (Pulido and Nichelson) and the tasteful work of drummer McKenzie Smith bring gravity to the band's gloss on psychedelic folk. Even the dull surface of Smith's voice exerts some heavy pull. "I had the path of wonder, there before me," he laments in Rulers, sounding less wide-eyed by the second.
