Tales from Terra Firma— Stornoway's second album

The record with the budget

Where the debut was a band making the most of what four people could carry, Tales from Terra Firma is the sound of that band being given room. It runs to forty-three minutes across nine tracks, which means the songs are long: “(A Belated) Invite to Eternity” alone takes six and a half minutes and uses all of them.

The arrangements do most of the arguing. Strings and brass are load-bearing here rather than decorative, and several of the songs build across two or three distinct movements instead of settling into verse and chorus. It is the record that answers the charge of gentleness levelled at the debut, and it answers it by getting bigger rather than louder.

The making of it

The band spent most of 2012 recording, and announced the album on 19 November that year. “Knock Me on the Head” went to radio on New Year’s Day 2013 — a deliberate piece of timing, dropping a single into the deadest week of the year and owning it — with the video following in late February and the album in March.

George Shilling mixed the majority of the tracks, as he has for most of what the band has released since 2011.

Reception

It entered the UK album chart at 26 and reviewed well: The Guardian gave it five stars, and it carries a Metacritic score of 71 across the British press. AllMusic gave it three and a half out of five.

Twenty-six is a lower placing than the debut’s fourteen, which is the sort of fact that gets read as a decline and rarely is. The debut had a viral video and a year of festival exposure behind it. This one had a longer, less immediately quotable set of songs.

The outtakes that became their own record

Enough material was left over that in September 2013 the band announced You Don’t Know Anything, a surprise mini-album of Terra Firma outtakes made available to fans ahead of a UK tour. AllMusic streamed it in full; Rolling Stone and Lauren Laverne’s BBC 6 Music show gave away the lead track, “Tumbling Bay”, as a free download in November.

It came out on 11 November 2013, and the tour behind it closed at the Barbican on 8 December. The next album, Bonxie, was funded by the band’s own audience.

Track listing