Fuel UpStornoway, Beachcomber's Windowsill

The first album track proper, and the point at which the debut stops being a singles collection.

After the singles

Zorbing and I Saw You Blink open the record; Fuel Up is what follows them, and it is a different proposition. Longer, less hurried, with a melody that takes its time arriving and an arrangement that builds in long horizontal layers instead of verse-chorus steps.

It is the track that tells you the band has an album in them, not two good singles and nine pieces of filler.

The sound of the thing

The instrumentation is characteristic: acoustic guitar underneath, keyboards and strings filling the middle, brass arriving to lift the last third. Three voices carry the harmony. The bass holds a steady floor while the texture above it changes repeatedly, which is the structural trick that most of this album runs on.

The title works the way several Stornoway titles do — a plain, slightly mundane phrase carrying more weight than it advertises.

A note on this page

Of the eleven tracks on the debut, this is the one whose original lyric page on the band’s old site is not preserved in any public archive. The pages either side of it are, and they run in album order, so the gap is almost certainly an accident of what got crawled rather than a page that never existed.

The song is on the record in any case, third of eleven, four minutes and twenty seconds, and it belongs in a complete account of the album.

What an album track has to do

The third song on a debut album has a thankless job. The singles have been played, the listener has decided whether they are interested, and this is the track that either holds them or loses them.

Fuel Up holds by changing the terms. It is slower to start than what precedes it and asks for a different kind of attention, which is a confident thing to do at that point in a record made by a band nobody had heard of two years earlier.

It is worth hearing in sequence rather than on shuffle, which is true of most of this album and truest here.

What the reviews said at the time

Alexis Petridis, reviewing Beachcomber’s Windowsill for the Guardian on 20 May 2010, rated it above the lead single — “Fuel Up is even better”, he wrote, immediately after praising Zorbing. He called it painfully acute and beautifully observed: a series of vignettes that start with a bored nine-year-old in the back of a car and end with him eighteen years later, trying and failing to reconnect with a schoolfriend on a visit home.

He was as precise about the sound as about the writing — the band’s largely acoustic palette, he wrote, coloured in with flecks of organ and what sounds like a cimbalom.

It is the only track on the album that he placed above a single.

In the sequence

On the record it follows I Saw You Blink and leads into The Coldharbour Road. That puts it third of eleven, at 4:20.

Nothing was lifted off the record here — for how Beachcomber's Windowsill was made, see its own page.