Silent Movie

Silent Movie

Quiet Village [K7]

2 June, 2008 | 1.31PM

• Written by: Mark Treadwell
• Filed under: Music Recommendations: quiet village, radioslave, rekids, silent movie

Outside the sky is clad in chainmail grey and it’s the sort of horrible rain that falls like annoyance from the heavens and makes you wish that instead of being stuck in an equally grey office, you could allow yourself to drift away into a swoon, and dream of Italian beaches or French Rivera cafes, of riding through deserted, sun scorched rolling hills on a silver stallion and before bedding down for the night, making love to a succulent senorita, in a honky tonk down in Mexico.

This is what Quiet Village ‘Silent Movie’ sounds like.

Matt (Radio Slave) Edwards and crate digger extraordinaire Joel Martin have pulled together all their previous, only limitedly available singles and housed them all in what could easily be the soundtrack to the movie of your summer were it ever to be captured on celluloid.

Whilst in essence this album follows in the Airforce One steps of Danger Mouse and DJ Shadow, in that each track is composed of multiple samples. 

Unlike some of other albums of its ilk, ‘Silent Movie’ as a whole far exceeds the parts that figure in its creation. 

‘Gold Rush’ is all lonesome cowboy slow mo disco, coming across like the sonic equivalent of Scorsese’s Travis Bickle or God’s Lonely man, as the character calls himself.

The album’s other highlight, ‘Pillow talk’, is a brooding dark beast that rides the back of a simple guitar refrain.

What begins as a fireside jam soon becomes a bass-led half-speed stomper, complete with ‘70s synthesizer-drenched guitar breakdown

Silent Movie is like the best bits of all your favourite non-silent films, somewhere between a mix of Eric Serra and Ennio Morricone providing the score for a combined Scorsese and Leone epic.

Avoiding all the tired clichés of hyperbolic happiness enclosed in the Balearic genre, as pedalled by the likes of the Café Del Mar franchise, it succeeds by at once being both cloaked in darkness whist never pandering to any sort of emo pretensions.

If the likes of Brennan Green and Studio are riding the Balearic bus, then Quiet Village are behind the wheel.

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