PISTOLS AT DAWN

Dan Mclachlan - lead vocals, guitar, keys, beats, programming; Jim Calverley - bass, guitar, keys, live vocals; Matt Ball - drums, guitar, beats, live vocals; Dave Williams - guitar, live vocals

Pistols At Dawn is an evolving recording-project-turned-band: a heady mix of 70s folk fused with beat-driven psychedelia. If Nick Cave and Fleet Foxes bowed to hip hop influences it might well sound something like this. Guitars are played; sometimes electric, usually acoustic. Live drums blend with manipulated beats. The drummer plays guitar, the bass is loud, the entire band sings. It's a warming experience, built from the wilderness, the seasons and the sea, and ultimately shaped by the city.

But how did it start? The band have played music together for years having met in the hallowed, snakebite-soaked halls of the University of Nottingham. Pistols At Dawn became a musical entity in 2003 and this latest evolutionary step finds them moving from stripped-back, angular and occasionally ferocious alternative rock to a calmer and more electronic approach. 2010: you would’ve found the members of London-based Pistols At Dawn somewhere in a flat in South East London, surrounded by a menagerie of instruments ranging from antique to utterly broken.

The album Tarnation started as a euphoric confusion of after-work acoustic guitars and programmed beats laid down as a tonic to the grinding tube journeys and swarming hubbub of London. A far cry from the band’s rock history, the resultant lo-fi ramblings sounded more like Bon Iver jamming with Massive Attack. If this was rock, it was rock in a horizontal fashion and was informed as much by the Beta Band and Wu Tang Clan as Four Tet and Mogwai.

Over the course of summer 2010, encircled by their improbable equipment, a clutch of songs emerged from simple grooves and riffs. Lo-fi recordings snuck into being over the course of an evening: Fugitives sidled in half way through dinner; Backwards appeared like a rumpled fiver in your back pocket.

The songs then lounged around, collars unbuttoned, sipping ale and waiting to see what would happen next. Inspired by this body of tunes, Dan fled to a secluded island and filled several notebooks with lyrics of love, loss, devotion and destruction. The album began to take shape.

In October 2010, with their resolute DIY ethic, Pistols At Dawn retreated to a vast haunted house on the outskirts of a remote plague village in Rutland and recorded the album Tarnation themselves in one long weekend. With the curtains drawn and log fires burning, surrounded by darkened corners and locked, musty rooms, surviving on a diet of very little sleep and local cider, the songs were re-cast in a blaze of hand-crafted, swift-fingered virtuosity.

The band returned triumphant to London and spent many a late night polishing the songs to an amber hue - tweaking, overlaying and mixing until the blend was complete. Tarnation was then conveyed to Pete Fletcher, a master craftsman and Nottingham cohort, to be mastered. It is now ready to grace your ears.

Reflecting their philosophy and love of all things homemade, the band formed their own label, Tres Beau Records, to release the material. As avid gig-goers, the members are adamant that live performance should, as ever, be a cornerstone of the Pistols At Dawn experience. Here, Dave Williams adds his warm guitar tones to the mix, delivering a woozy textured sound to the audiences of London and beyond.