Midlake, Shepherd's Bush Empire

They're a group of Texan Jazz musicians who don’t play jazz. A Radiohead-orbiting rock band who want to sound like Jethro Tull. A band grown from themind of a man no longer involved. It is these contradictions that breathe life into the wonderful myth that is Midlake.
They’re travelling a long way to play Shepherd’s Bush Empire on February 26 – all the way from the Deep South, where they started from. In 1999, five bearded jazz students from North Texas College of Music formed a folk-rock band. Their 70s sound worked: combining heartfelt harmonies plenty of harpsi-keyboard and a yearning American-settler mythology (consider the title of their 2006 second album: The Trials of Van Occupanther, or the lyrics to Roscoe: '1891, They roamed around and foraged/ They made their house from cedars,/ They made their house from stones’).
All that deified wilderness, plus a professional knowledge of musical arrangement, took the band through three hugely successful albums. From 2006-13 they toured the world, picking up an array of fans.
But earlier this year, after two years worth of writing and recordings for their new album was completed, the lead singer and central songwriter Tom Smith catastrophically walked away from the band. They could have kept some of the material; the bruised fruit of two years labour but the band cathartically abandoned it all. Somehow, pride intact, they recorded new album Antiphon in just six months.
Guitarist Eric Pulido stated in a press release that Antiphon 'is the most honest representation of the band as a whole, as opposed to one person’s vision'. The exit of ‘one person’ doesn’t seem to have overly aggrieved Midlake. Antiphon is a perfectly shaped piece of Arcadian folk-rock: the harmonies, flute and Eighteenth Century pioneers remain intact, though joined by some serious proggy rock-outs (especially in Vale) The album picks up up where The Courage of Others, left off. Thank god for that.