British Sea Power - Man Of Aran

Fish or fowl, BSP record their desert island disc

After asking Do You Like Rock Music?, BSP have made music specifically for a collection of massive rocks off the west coast of Ireland. A sort of fictionalised documentary, 1934’s Man Of Aran follows a family cobbled together from unrelated islanders and a boatful of fishermen who strive to live on near-desolate land, where soil is a luxury commodity and oil has to be extracted from basking sharks. Anachronistic as it is (the techniques used to capture the shark in the frenzied centrepiece having not been used on the Aran Islands for years), it’s nontheless compelling in the telling.

It’s fitting that BSP, a group seemingly at odds with the times in which they find themselves, took to writing the new score. In conjunction with Man Of Aran, it works brilliantly. The ebbs and flows they bring to their albums only enhance the man-at-war-with-nature visuals: hunts for soil, harvesting seaweed, island rocks penned in by crashing waves on all sides. As a standalone 75-minute piece it’s slightly less successful, not quite working as neatly as, say, the instrumental The Great Suka from DYLRM?, which soars beautifully as it’s dropped into the middle of an album. This nevertheless has it’s drive, culminating in It Comes Back Again, an instrumental reworking of their True Adventures.

Rought Trade | RTRADCD 499 (CD+DVD)

Reviewed by Jason Draper
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