Written by: Dave Cantrell
Some albums, it should be noted, seem to fly across the country well under the radar and land in my mailbox as if to reinforcee the radiant understatedness of its contents. In this case, with Louis Phillipe & The Night Nail’s second full-length The Road to the Sea (released May 2nd on the estimable Tapete label), it can’t be said that this writer has any reason to be surprised by the quality hereon seeing as it’s his second go-round with this lot having covered Mr. Philippe’s debut outing (also on Tapete) with the same crack hired-hand band back in one of those Quarantine Age Kicks columns in 2020 but it would nonetheless not be inaccurate to say he is still rather bowled over by the elegant consistency and just pure strength of this follow-up. Where to start? Well, on “The Road to Nowhere,” of course, this gem’s gem-like opener.
Darkly wistful, etched in tones of a now-questioned nostalgia, the track nonetheless enchants, drawing one in as if by an enchantress’s lure in audio form what with its rich understatement of cello, the pinging languor of an electric guitar and just an overall atm0sphere of Mystery on a, um, road trip with Longing and Hope, their destination a viewpoint above the sea, the sun setting brilliantly and if you derive from that a note of fatalistic beauty we are, indeed, on the same page.
From there we journey through the gently jaunty “Pictures of Anna” that in its muted urgency rather defines the term ‘elegant pop romp,’ the utterly irresistible “Where Did We Go Wrong” behind which, while clothed in timeless tropes, once can easily picture a ballroom of lithe couples dressed in casual resplendence sweeping across the dancefloor; the quietly beguiling “La Maisson San Toit” (one of only three out of fourteen tracks here sung in Philippe’s native French), it’s outward lightness of touch masking the actual complexity at work, the subtle layering an innate thing of beauty and, hell, we’re not even halfway through and the fact that the next track – “Those Days of Summer” – with its, again, seemingly offhand abundance of surprising detail, will catch you a bit, shall we say, avant off-garde, in the process pulling you deeper into this enchanting record only further cements The Road to the Sea‘s timeless and, really, quite exquisite quality.
Trust us, be it the yearn and buoyancy of “All at Sea” that defines the (just made-up) cross-genre ‘existential pop’ – very French, you have to admit – the sudden onset of subtle complexity that makes “Watching Your Sun Go Down” a highlight among highlights, the way “A Friend” will have you staring wistfully through the mists of your own history and the, yes, longing that comes with it, the softly immersive “To the Sea” that unfurls like some delicate lament of a siren’s song or “Ville Lumière” that, with its none-more-classic three-minute length sunsets the album in what we can’t help but describe as a lush hush, there’s nothing here that doesn’t, in its own way, speak to the sincerity of true beauty.
Insofar as this latest from Louis Phillipe & the Night Nail presents as something of an instant late night classic, it’s the production from Catenary Wires‘ Andy Lewis that damn near merits equal kudos with Philippe’s gift of peerless – and, yes, damn near fearless – songcraft. When augmented by a studio crew (Lewis on bass, lefty guitarist Robert Rotifer from Electric Eels and more, Ian Button from the Cat Wires, Thrashing Doves and a host of others on drums+) that raises the ‘simpatico élan bar’ to rarefied heights, it’s no surprise one ends up with an album as seductive, moving, and solid as The Road to the Sea. [get your copy in your fave format here]
