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T | Turin Brakes | The Optimist LP

Turin Brakes - The Optimist LP

Turin Brakes’ Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian have known each other since their early school days. The two even started off singing in the school’s choir at the age of 10 and spending their free time playing, singing and improvising with their guitars, taking inspiration from diverse influences as Prince and The Black Crowes. This was at a time when they were playing with more conventional rock and pop instruments and while this was satisfying, they almost felt as if they had more to offer elsewhere. They soon switched to acoustic and the end result of years of work together from their teen years spent together paid off in the 2001 debut album The Optimist LP.

The album opens with a sound that later transpires as a typical Turin Brakes feel. Felling Oblivion mixes the sounds of guitars and violin with near perfect results, an almost dreamy melody that is enough to serenade even the most uptight individual to sleep. This returns in later tracks Future Boy and By TV Light, (the latter of which is the actual four track recording, produced outside of the studio). But the duo’s abilities are restricted to an unplugged performance and their talent for producing catchy numbers is partially demonstrated in arguably the best songs on the album Underdog (Save Me) and Mind Over Money, (containing guitar chords reminiscent of some of Jimmy Page’s work), both of which along with State Of Things prove that their early fondness of things electrically sounding hasn’t completely expired. As for the other tracks, on their own they can at times sound weak and leave the listener wanting to turn off, but in the context of the album as a whole, are most certainly not filler tracks.

If ever a debut album was a full roller coaster of tempo and feelings, whilst keeping within the general framework of acoustic and easy listening, this has to be it. Nominated for the Mercury Music Prize in, retrospectively, one of the strongest years for the quality of the shortlist, (and only marginally losing out to PJ Harvey), The Optimist LP is one of those albums that grows on you with each listen and given a larger audience could be defined as one of the greatest albums of the decade, (and this is a bold statement when we are only halfway through it). I would recommend it to any fans of bands and artists like Radiohead, Bob Dylan and Jeff Buckley or folk and acoustic in general. A word of warning though, don’t expect to love this album immediately, it took me up to half a dozen times to really get into all the music, but some tracks do stick out from day one as gems and will leave you feeling like you have discovered something that mainstream radio has largely ignored thus far.

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