Here’s a quick guide to being a successful curator of a Late Night Tales album. Make sure you present a collection of laid back music that has a general coherence, showcases your influences, offers a couple of surprisingly good off the wall choices, a cover version, a story at the end and you’re all done.
Sounds simple enough but not everyone can make it a success. Belle and Sebastian, with their look at laid back pop over the decades and Midlake’s focus on folk rock were superb examples of a curator getting it right. But the series’ most recent effort by Metronomy failed miserably, darting all over genres and offering few tracks of interest.
After that disaster the pressure was firmly on Friendly Fires to prove that Late Night Tales is still one of the finest series of compilations around.
Fans of Friendly Fires and the series should be pleased to hear they pass with flying colours. It’s not a collection as good as say Belle and Sebastian’s but they still tick all of the aforementioned boxes, focusing on their key influences of 70s and 80s electronica and merging the genre well with the shoegaze of the Cocteau Twins and Slowdive and remarkably Olivia Newton John.
It’s John’s 1971 b-side Love Song that shines brightest here, a wonderful, forgotten slow pop track, full of the kind of guitar arrangements that are sure to have influenced a host of alternative acts, not just Friendly Fires.
Friendly Fires cover of Eberhard Schoener and Sting’s 1978 Why Don’t You Answer is another interesting moment that sticks to the Late Night Tales template well and breathes some new life into the song.
Other highlights include Bibio’s Don’t Summarise My Summer Eyes and Slowdive’s Shine, which is wonderful to hear and shows how similar the late 1980s shoegaze indie sound was to the pop electronica that preceded and followed it. The collection ends with the first part of the short story, Flat of Angles read by Sherlock Holmes actor Benedict Cumberbatch.
8/10
by Joe Lepper
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