“Two Times” has everything we have come to expect of Arliston, and quite a bit more.
When Jack (Singer/Guitarist) played a rough phone recording of a piano idea to the band, they realised a TV gently murmuring away in the background had whispered out some pithy statements that had been picked up in the recording. “It all started from there,” admits Jordi Bosch (Drummer) “Those accidental voices filled the piano idea with all the meaning a song could ever want.”
Initially, the listener is greeted by sparse, eddying piano and the muffled voices of fishermen. As their voices and their worries cement and grow firm, so too does the track. First a loop of the piano clicks into place, followed by the thudding drum kit and a chorus of synthesizers and vocals. Suddenly you are immersed in hum of potential energy, swelling inexorably towards the first chorus.
The constant piano loop sets up the off-kilter syncopation that the drums are able to intertwine with and bounce off of, like some kind of mad fish darting upstream, suffusing the song with a rhythmic intensity that is as unusual as it is compelling.
The song itself explores themes of fear, and how fear of failure can often be the only surefire way to guarantee it. Jack Ratcliffe says of the song “the voices captured this real, palpable sense of every worry in the spectrum, from domestic worry to sheer survival…putting a song around it couldn’t have been easier, as frankly we’re all hand-wringing worriers in Arliston.”
Arliston are a soundscape made up of analogue synth pads, multi-layered harmonies and guitars, that swell into cathedral-like scale heights before collapsing back down to an intimate solo voice and instrument. A sound that has been compared to Bon Iver, The National and James Blake.
After support from Clash, The 405, Kaltblut, BBC Radio 1, Amazing Radio and Spotify Playlisting; Arliston are getting significant national recognition.