For Their Love

American band Other Lives return five years after their last album with their 4th release. The first thing you notice is how good it sounds, the band have self-produced this album and it’s as lush an album as you’d come across. Opening track Sound of Violence starts off with muted instrumentation allowing singer Jesse Tabish’s voice to take centre stage. The whole album has a kind of widescreen, Old Western feel to it with sweeping strings, fingerclicks, bongs and rattling percussion, which gives tracks like Lost Day and All Eyes / For Their Love a ranch, cowboy feel. Tabish has an old-fashioned, almost crooner voice and he uses it to great effect on Dead Language. The clear standout is We Wait, which hams it up a lot but it works, building from a quiet strum to add mariachi horns, dramatic drum rolls, finger clicks, it’s very reminiscent of Ennio Morricone’s Western soundtracks. You’ll find yourself whistling The Good, The Bad and the Ugly long before it’s over, after you blow the desert dust off your Stetson. If you’re dreaming of escaping, this album will help you do that, albeit for 37 minutes or so.