The Blue Nile - High

The Blue Nile released their fourth album, High in 2004, a mere eight years after their previous album.  The slow drift of their music seemed to carry through to their productivity.  It's been well-documented that the Scottish band take their time, crafting every note.

For those who found the prominent guitars and general upbeat vibe of Peace At Last a bit jarring, this was a welcome return to the moodier sound of old.  On first listen, you could be forgiven for wondering: where are the standout songs?  The album seems to drift by, one song flow into another.  It opens with repeating keyboards of The Day of Our Lives, a sparse track that allows Paul Buchanan's voice to fill the gaps.  It's strongly reminiscent of Over the Hillside.  

Some of it misses the mark, the slow shuffle of I Would Never is a little close to U2 territory for comfort, while Broken Lives channels the eighties a little too strongly.  But the rest is very listenable.  The slow, picked guitars of Because of Toledo would have sat well on Peace At Last, the organ in the background adds atmosphere.  

The title track feels like the centrepiece.  Opening with elegiac keyboards and a gorgeous Buchanan vocal singing resonant lyrics like "I don't want to wake you when you're sleeping so quiet" and later "look at the morning people going to work and fading away".  It feels like an instant classic, it just makes you want to float away from the world. 

This is probably not the album to introduce people to the Blue Nile.  But those who enjoy A Walk Across the Rooftops and Hats will want this one and hold it close.

The Cure - Wish

By 1992, The Cure were beginning to feel very 1980s, along had come 'Madchester', shoegaze and grunge, not to mention the rave scene.  Certainly by the time Wish, their ninth album was released not many of us were even thinking about Robert Smith and co. What is evident from first track Open is The Cure had amped up the guitars, they 'rock' a little more, but in a 'Cure-like' way.  High sees them on more familiar ground, a hummable, breezy tune. We also get the more immersive, glacial songs like Apart, which has wonderfully downbeat guitar lines you can just sink into, with the gorgeous, simple lyric "how did we get so far apart, we used to be so close together".  Later in the album, Trust and To Wish Impossible Things.

From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea has a bit of Stones and a bit of goth thrown together to make something that is, at seven and a half minutes, a bit much to be honest.  Wendy Time is a little 'quirky-Cure-by-numbers', not that there's anything wrong with that but it just feels like Smith could do this in his sleep.  Very hard to know what to say about Friday I'm In Love at this stage, but it seemed to press a lot of Cure buttons back in 1992 and is probably one of their most synonymous songs, and indeed casual fans would be hard pushed to name any more recent Cure songs.

Letter to Elise is an almost perfect distillation of Pictures of you, it would almost seem like a ripoff except that it's just so soothing, thanks mainly to some absolutely awesome guitar work.  In fact this could well be The Cure's guitar album. End is the last track, drenched in guitars it bookends the album nicely. While by no means a classic Cure album, there are enough good songs to carry this one through, so if you like this sort of thing, there's plenty to enjoy here.