The Bathers – ‘Garlands’ from ‘Sirenesque’

For the past three decades or so I have always wanted to enjoy The Bathers’ albums more than I have done. The debut ‘Unusual Places To Die’ certainly ticked the boxes, as perhaps might have been expected for a record following on relatively shortly after the demise of Friends Again, the Bothwell band that really ought to have given singer-songwriter Chris Thomson chart topping fame. By the time of 1990’s ‘Sweet Deceit’ however, I had already started to feel distanced from Thomson’s apparent slide into ever more gravel throated deliveries, grown apart from what I suspected at the time might be overly ‘difficult’ orchestrated pretensions. And this despite a great opening line about following someone home from the Glasgow School Of Art and taking a night train to Paris, France. In many ways that line set up The Bathers trajectory, as each subsequent record seemed to immerse itself in European Bohemia, all unfiltered Gitanes smoke, Camus paperbacks and the glamour of the doomed romantic. With each subsequent album too I would think ‘this time it will be different. THIS time it will all click’ even whilst building the resigned awareness that it probably wouldn’t. I came, then, to ‘Sirenesque’ with this baggage and these doubts. Prepared to be disappointed. Underwhelmed, even. How gloriously wrong I was.

I nearly didn’t even bother. Only the irresistible pull of an opening track called ‘Culzean’ dragged me in. Like many raised on the Ayrshire coast of Scotland, Culzean is a place of childhood memory and wonderment; its grounds and Castle (a Robert Adam masterpiece) rightly considered the epitome of the Picturesque movement in Scotland. Anyone who attempted to brave the appalling adaptation of ‘The Buccaneers’ on Apple TV this year will have spotted it masquerading as the home of Lord Tintagel, but Unpopular readers are certainly more likely to know it as Lord Summerisle’s mansion in ‘The Wicker Man’. The short instrumental, punctuated with bird song, is a fitting opening to the record, for it both sets a mood and positions us within a sense of place. So whilst ’Sirenesque’ does also continue to inhabit those European Bohemian landscapes as witnessed in previous Bathers records, it also perhaps stresses historical connections and sympathies between Scotland and the Continent.

Thomson’s voice is still gravelly, but it now sounds a shade softer. More natural. Less affected, perhaps, or just that bit more mature. Indeed everything on ‘Sirenesque’ now sounds more intimate, luxuriously enfolded within the faded elegance of damask curtains exposed too long to sunlight. In many respects then Culzean feels like it not only sets the tone for the record, but also that its spirit inhabits its entirety. The songs are arranged like photographs arranged just so on a walnut Queen Anne side table, their gilt frames catching the blue from the Firth of Clyde. Squint and you can make out Ailsa Craig. Raise your eyes and you will see Arran. On the clearest day perhaps the Paps Of Jura or, looking south and west, the slimmest sliver of land that is Ireland. D.E. Stevenson was certainly familiar with the romantic possibilities of this coastline, and then, yes!, here we are at ‘The Camellia House’. Restored and reglazed in 1995, I mostly remember it in its semi-derelict state, a ghostly presence following us on night-time walks back from Maidens in the late 1980s. I wonder which state Thomson imagines it being in as his characters meet in a surreal theatrical sequence, whispers of a French woman’s voice fading in the background. “In many ways” Thomson suggests, this place “becomes their love song” and in many ways too this entire album is perhaps a love song to that aforementioned Euro/Scots romance. Or this might just be me and my imaginations. It’s entirely possible.

‘Sirenesque’ almost insists that it be listened to in its entirety, such is the manner in which each song flows from the others; each of those notional photographs picking up cues from the others to weave a dreamy narrative of romantic fiction. And whilst it may or may not be a ‘concept’ it is assuredly an album.

It is the gorgeous ‘Garlands’ to which I am most drawn, however. With the strings of the Scottish Strings Ensemble laying down a delectable bed of swooping Madras lace curtains that billow in the soft South Westerly’s, ‘Garlands’ rotates itself around a refrain where “we may laugh and we may sing”. I have visions of Joan Fontaine’s vulnerable beauty in ‘Rebecca’ here, for ‘Garlands’ is cinematic; is the understated glamour of the past filtered through a soft re-focusing of the present. Angelic voices shimmer like stars in the night and we shiver in delectable surrender.

Like the rest of the album in which it sits, it is romantic, timeless, seductive and utterly, effortlessly beguiling.