Porridge Radio return with a second big break-up song from their forthcoming fourth album.
Is it possible to love a band without really knowing their records? Whenever I hear Porridge Radio I like what I’m listening to, but I’ve never consciously sat down and listened to an album, or seen them live.
They always seem to me like a female-fronted Radiohead, not in the way they sound but in the way they pursue their own creative path without much reference to whatever else is going on in music at the same time.
As for musical reference points, I hear something of the eclectic intensity of Tim Buckley in Dana Margolin’s vocal style, and the band’s freewheeling approach has something in common with the likes of Goat Girl and Dry Cleaning, Horsegirl and Courting.
Margolin, who essentially was Porridge Radio at the beginning, singing at open mic nights in Brighton until the additions of Georgie Stott on keyboards, Sam Yardley on drums and bass guitarist Maddie Ryall (recently replaced by Dan Hutchins, making his debut on this song) and, in time, second guitarist Josh Harvey.
She has a manner that seems simultaneously intense and carefree, and their music has a similar vibe; she wrote the defiant Sick Of The Blues after a painful break-up and returns to it on A Hole In The Ground, in which she sings: “Take off all of my clothes and run to your house / Where in place of a door is a hole in the ground / And I fill it with salt, the hard bits of my heart / They fall into the hole and they tear it apart.”
It’s a devastating song that she describes as “a gentle lullaby – but also a folk tale with a tragic ending; a song about knowing what you don’t know yet, seeing the future by guessing, being right.” You don’t get self-analysis like that with the Gallaghers, do you?
Nor do you get videos like this one, shot at the Pompidou Centre in Paris by Dana’s film-maker sister Ella Margolin on a set, designed by Ellie Wintour, inspired by the work of sculptors Alexander Calder and Constantin Brâncuși, complete with a gravelled stage, willowy pillars hanging from the ceilings and mime artists moving around the stage with various props.
takThe song is taken from their forthcoming album Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me, continuing their preference for long album titles after their debut Rice, Pasta And Other Fillers and Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky… but not their Mercury-nominated second album Every Bad.