This four track EP from Berkshire band Coley Park is worth buying just for the cover if you ask me. Designed to look like a vintage orange Penguin paper back, it fills you with a nostalgic joie de vivre before you even take the CD (or vinyl) out – something you just can’t get by downloading an mp3. Ah, for a return to the pre-digital ‘good old days’…
This nostalgia is something that continues with Coley Park’s music, starting with ‘Quiet Lanes’ (taken from the band’s third album Rhinoceros’), a paean to the curiosities of the English countryside where “magic water dries, over quiet country lane, grass spilt either side”. It is a folk rock song, more alt-country than indiepop, but one that would sit happily in either genre, and the addition of some trumpet and Hammond-esque keyboard (that’s Hammond Organ, not Richard Hammond – I have no idea how he plays the keyboard) gives it a summery feel that belies its slightly menacing lyrics.
The eccentric ‘Thurston Moore’ starts with a woozy introduction that sounds like one of those afternoons at primary school when the teacher hands out random instruments to the kids. In a good way. Featuring the Go! Team’s Ian Parton, it is a leisurely folk song where vocals chime slightly discordantly with a perfectly simple recorder line, to wonderfully unsettling results.
On side two of the EP, ‘Meadow Song’ is like a whispered re-telling of ‘We Are Sailing’, while ‘Tired Disappointed Blue’ is another of Coley Park’s slightly off-kilter, lo-fi summertime folk pop moments. The former’s banjo would not be out of place around a campfire and the latter’s breathy vocals turn into a grand indiepop chorus that culminates with an ever so charming impression of a train going “Choo choo choo”. Both songs, like their counterparts on side one, combine the lo-fi exploits of the likes of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Grandaddy and more with an enchanting Englishness that is guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
“Everyone else seems happy just to head for their final destination, without caring about the stations they pass through”, declare Coley Park as one on ‘Tired Disappointed Blue’. If you find yourself passing through Coley Park Station, make sure you take a look around: you won’t be disappointed.
First published on rockfeedback.com. See it here.
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