The Open - The Silent Hours (2004)

The Silent Hours, debut album from Stafford's the Open, sees the young Midlands boys adding their name to the ledger that bears the print of former Brit cosmos-wanderers from the Verve to the Teardrop Explodes, from Shack to the Blue Nile. Recorded with ex-Cocteau Twins member Simon Raymonde, it's an album with an expansive, immersive sound characterised by the interlocking psychedelic textures of keyboardist Al Dutton and guitarist Jon Winter, and completed by the winsome stargazer vocals of frontman Steven Bayley. Lyrically, tracks such as "Coming Down" offer pretty standard generic fare: "When did we start coming down?" pleads Bayley, adrift in a gentle whirlpool of balladic piano and kaleidoscopic guitar flourishes. But for an album made by a bunch of lads clearly stoned out of their gourd, The Silent Hours boasts a rather commendable focus: see "Just Want to Live", a delicate hymn to survival that builds into a mantra of spine-tingling strength, harmonies tumbling over one another in a grand wave that finally brings the song to its close--or the closing "Elevation", a sky-scraping feat of mighty Brit indie drama on a par with the Doves' "Catch the Sun". - Louis Pattison