Long-Distance LullabyStornoway, Beachcomber's Windowsill

The last track on the debut, and the one that decides what kind of band had just introduced itself.

Closing the record

Eleventh of eleven, four minutes seventeen. A closing track has one job — to tell you what the album was — and this one does it by being the quietest and most direct thing on the record.

A lullaby sung down a phone line, across a distance, to someone who is not there. The conceit is simple and the song does not over-explain it, which is why it works.

The sound

The arrangement strips back almost everything the album has been accumulating. Where earlier tracks pile on trumpet, glockenspiel and strings, this one holds to voice, guitar and the barest support, and lets the harmony do the emotional work unassisted.

That decision is what makes the record cohere. An album that ended on its biggest arrangement would be a collection of songs. Ending here makes it an album.

What came after

Three years later the band released Tales from Terra Firma, whose songs run to five and six minutes and move through distinct movements. The seed of that ambition is audible in the last three tracks of the debut, and most clearly here.

For a band assembled out of a single reply to an advert, finishing a first album this confidently is not a small thing.

The lullaby as a form

A lullaby has one job and a strict set of constraints: it must be simple, repetitive and calm enough to work on someone who is not listening critically. Writing one for an adult audience means keeping the constraints and losing the function.

This song keeps them. The melody is narrow, the arrangement is thin by the standards of the record, and the repetition is deliberate rather than economical. What it loses is the reassurance — a lullaby sung across a distance to someone who is not there does not settle anything.

Ending a debut album on a form associated with children, sung to an absent adult, is an unusual last word. It is also the moment the record stops being charming and becomes something else.

How the record was received, from one end to the other

The album closes here, and the critical response to it closed nowhere: Beachcomber’s Windowsill drew two stars out of five from the Independent and five out of five from God Is In The TV in the same month.

In between sat the Guardian and the Times at four, NME at eight out of ten, Drowned in Sound at seven, AllMusic at three and a half. It is a spread you almost never see on a debut, and it is the most useful thing the reviews say about the band: there was no agreed reading of them at all.

It went to 14 in the UK album chart regardless, and was later certified silver.

In the sequence

On the record it follows The End of the Movie, and closes the album. That puts it last of eleven, at 4:17.

It reached listeners only as part of the album; Beachcomber's Windowsill has the dates and the chart placing.