I foresee problems with this album... big ones at that. Though 66e are known to anyone with an ear cocked to Ireland’s live circuit, how they ever do justice to their pristine, skyscraping sound in Ireland’s toilet venues is beyond me.
Fall Down Seven Times, Stand Up Eight is by all accounts an album that has been in the making for several months, and boy does it sound it. Left to marinade in its own splendid creative juices, the 66e sound has morphed from something cutesy and introspective into a glorious sonic sprawl, with vertiginous climaxes and windswept hooks.
Despite having jilted the neat song structures for the most part, there is much to suggest that this band is very much ready for the masses. Instrumentals ‘Lisanton’ and ‘One Cast One-Catch’ suggest unyielding, prog-like tendencies that would make Explosions In The Sky proud, while ‘66e Are Home’ and ‘(A Little) Brown Bear’ are charged with atmosphere and fragility.
It’s easy to see why those lazy Radiohead comparisons have been wheeled out in the past. While both bands have a penchant for pouring their cracked, lugubrious emotions into senseless, shapeless oeuvres, 66e have eschewed Radiohead’s clinical edge for something entirely more warm and gentle. If we must talk reference points, it’s perhaps fairer to equate 66e with the elegiac likes of Elbow or Doves.
To my mind, it’s the widescreen masterpiece ‘Scrambled Pictures’ that may well prove to be the band’s passport to greater pastures. Evoking shades of The Frames and Keane, it’s a gloriously noisy epic that builds from a placid, unassuming indie number into a climax that would put many seasoned bedwetting troubadours to shame.
In all, Fall Down Seven Times, Stand Up Eight is an album whose wonderment and sublimity is very much immediate. Expect greatness from these guys…you won’t be disappointed.