gravitygirl.com
departure lounge 'too late to die young' (bella union)

Departure Lounge lounge in the liltingest, cooingest, tunesmithingest manner; affecting a laidback, romantic romanticism whose twinkling eyes belie the manful nature of the combo's cautious songwriting. With a quartet of cats split between London and Nashville, Departure Lounge know about departure lounges; about expanses of sky and sea and the tyrannies of distance; and their distanced constituents have come to embrace the notion of the musical-gathering. Where their debut disc Out Of Here heard frontman Tim Keegan's stately Morrissey/Go-Betweens leant pop-songs presented in gentle and functional emotivism, this time around --with an instrumental stop-over in between-- the combo embrace the idea of the gathered band, and they do this in and amongst much sonic gamesmanship, with Parisienne downtempo hip-hop smoker Kid Loco producing an album of swelling, grand sentimentality. As in: there are many songs on Too Late To Die Young that seem less like straight-up pop songs and more like refined jams; but, then, in coloured collage around such four-men there's the cut-n-paste kid Kid Loco, digging out all these old blues-rock sides, and sculpting Departure Lounge into something approximating an imagined idyll of the 70s rockband, piecing together rapturous blues-rock numbers --replete with wrung out ivory-thunk piano and wailing harp and squallor'd guitar bluster and atonal horn hollers keept to a skid-row skidoo-- and having them rub shoulders with shoulder-rubbing, weepy, stringsy balladry. At times, too, though, the whole thing sounds a little shoegaze; and, then, like, at other times it just sounds like the Triffids or something.
Anthony Carew