Royal Ottawa – ‘Beautiful’ from ‘Carcosa’

Any long term Unpopular followers will almost certainly know the wonderful Wally Salem who runs the tremendous Beautiful Music label and who may just be the most marvellously and naturally enthusiastic fan of music one can think of (it’s a close run thing with Brogues of ‘Not unloved’ fame). Certainly I have had Wally to thank for bringing any number of records and artists to my attention over the years, and this year perhaps his biggest recommendation was for the ‘Carcosa’ set by Royal Ottawa.

Now unlike Wally I have no personal memory of or emotional attachment to the history of (members of) Royal Ottawa, tracking back to 80s act Bugs Harvey Oswald and later side-project The Lake Effect Sound. For me then, ‘Carcosa’ has to stand (or fall) on its own merits, and after what was admittedly an initial coolness, I gave the album some further listens and with each run through it thawed my heart just that little more. At an hour and twenty and on its limited vinyl edition an epic double album, ‘Carcosa’ is for me, in truth, just a little overlong and could certainly be trimmed. I still remain unconvinced when the band up the tempo, for example, and the vocal treatment can be unnecessarily electronic at times. But I am being picky, and in truth I suspect that these are distinctly personal objections, borne of my innate mistrust for All Things Prog. True, those barriers have been broken down in recent years, not least through the likes of Nick Halliwell’s The Granite Shore, with whom I think Royal Ottawa certainly share reference points, but ingrained habits are hard to break.

When I do manage to reframe my reference points, however, ‘Carcosa’ puts me in mind of the mighty Swell, another act whose sound managed to tread the line between Progressive and Alternative with remarkable poise and aplomb. At times too they recall Dire Straits’ epic manifestations of the surreal splendour in the grubby everyday. Once upon a time I would have balked at suggesting such a thing, but this was before the likes of War On Drugs or Strand Of Oaks made such a reference cool (again) for terminally insecure souls such as mine, and after I had spent hours in a teenage bedroom immersed in the first three albums.

‘Carcosa’ at its best then recalls something of that pleasure of being unaware of the expectations of Hipness that comes in our early years and that (with luck) dissolves in later ones. It combines reflections on the past with mature rumination on the present to produce a whole that is awkward enough to reward repeated listenings and to stand proud as something resolutely outside of fashion or expectation. That’s a pretty fine achievement.