Monkton: The ‘Music I listened to the other day, and I quite like it so I’m going to tell you about it a little bit’ Prize 2009

While we all bask in the incandescent glow of this year’s Mercury Prize, we might take a moment to imagine a world without such a beacon of aural enlightenment and cultural consensus… Or not. Alternatively ->

From the boughs of the family twee, Sounds Familyre bring us the familiar sounds of Ortolan, familiar in the ‘déjà vu’ sense, like I is well heard this before but not really heard this before actually - excepting, that is, the conventional mien of eeriness that surround that sort of experience. What we get instead is a mien of cheeriness and a pleasing hit of feelgoodly-ness, the kind that can only come from an uncommonly sage appreciation of one’s own naïveté and a canny knack for a good pop tune. Which is Ortolan’s game. The youth and good taste of this band comes aboard two-by-two, unpretentiously and artfully. Rather notable in the world of twee pop since The Magic Numbers are just too fat and happy (something we are all naturally skeptical of) and chart-toppers like ‘5 Years Time’ are just too earnest and insight-free. Understandably, with The Magic Numbers shuffled all the way down one end of the twee-saw, it’s hard to strike a balance - and so, I think, Ortolan deserve a spotlight, if not yet one of them hugely sought after Mercury Prizes.

MP3: ‘I’ll See You There’ - Ortolan

The Ortolan EP is chipper and melodic, held fast by familiar 50s progressions, plonky-tonk piano and downright sing-songy-ness. From the deftly heartfelt yet youthfully superficial ‘Me N U’, to the fleetingly sad seaside waltz ‘Sand Castles’, we are taken on a trip along the borders of maturity and immaturity, a polaroid of nascent musicians, nascent human beings even - who remarkably possess the dexterity to pay tribute to both their adolescence and burgeoning adulthood without compromising either to pretension, or that simple human urge to be what you would like to be and not what you are. Or, at least, when they do assimilate, they willfully appreciate what they are doing. Funny that the hallmarks of 50s rhythm’n’blues speak to the nostalgic parts of 80s and 90s babies, culturally inherited and essentially imaginary as it is - but here the sound of the past, and thus everything that we are and would like retain, is held up to the light in celebration and submission. And so in this ballroom of real and idolized memory, the near-adults hide behind their sand castles and carry the light of their convictions by bucket-and-spade, both a sign of youth and evidence of its conflicted remission -

“the moon a bright yellow, i hold a bucket up for light, I carry it with me through the night”

Ortolan may have the kind of authenticity that gets lost down between the sofa cushions for being twee yet somehow not featured in an iPhone advert - and that would indeed be a great shame. There is more to offer here than your standard twee pop and, no doubt, more of note to come from this quartet in future. Until then, I guess we can more than make do with the magnetic nascence and promise of this debut EP.

Ortolan EP
Spotify / iTunes

Monkton x