| This single is the first to be released from the forthcoming second album by Devon based group Fireworks Night, and if this is anything to go by they have been brewing some very strange things indeed down there in the West Country.
The A side, ‘When We Fell Through The Ice’ is a Vaudevillian duet between front man James Lesslie and Briony Greenhill. Energised with Dionysian whimsy, it tells the story of two lovers, who after drinking wine decide to go out onto a frozen river where they then fall together through the ice. One can readily picture the singers in character, swaying in each other’s arms as a slow building backing (which comes to include guitar, ukulele, banjo, violin and military drums) swells up behind their voices. The lyrics revel in the melodrama, with the song ending on a note of dark delight with the line, ‘Lilies hang as chandeliers above our happy home.’
The B-side, ‘Echo’s Swing’ is something truly special. Beginning as a sparse, spectral waltz, which initially features only piano and vocals, it soon brings in a nerve tingling guitar tremolo before the music blossoms out to evoke a phantasmagoric world of masked balls and dark, jaded opulence in which the singer is ‘dancing with ghosts of the people I love.’ From this Masque of the Red Death, one is then whisked away as the song rises to what becomes a crescendo of haunted fairground music, the instruments howling like a strange wind as the empty rides spin faster and faster.
Brimming with macabre theatricality, this is less a song than it is a séance! Enticing and deliciously eerie, it stirs the hairs on the back of the neck into paroxysm. This is the kind of music one inhales. The press release says this is a perfect introduction to what one can expect on the album, and if this is the case one can indeed expect great things.
Written by Tom Philips for www.glasswerk.co.uk, May 2006.
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