The men of Midlake would likely agree with such an adjective — the Denton-formed folk-rock collective achieved its success in part because it very much sweats the details — and staring down the prospect of crafting what would become its third album, The Courage of Others, must have been intimidating.
Whatever hesitation or heartburn Midlake felt about making Others was met with steady focus and determination, yielding a record that marks its 15th anniversary this year.
To mark the occasion, Midlake is reissuing a deluxe, two-LP edition of The Courage of Others on May 30 via its own label. This new pressing will feature a pair of 180-gram vinyl records in gatefold packaging, as well as B-sides and live tracks from the Others era, on vinyl for the first time ever.
That Others, a richly textured, dark-hued excursion into the tall grass of obscure and semi-obscure 1970s British folk music (Pentangle or Fairport Convention, say), has aged so well is hardly a surprise. Hearing it in 2010 was like teleporting back several decades to the era of mood rings and bell-bottoms.
On release day, Eric Pulido of Midlake will be at Good Records starting at 1 p.m. for an in-person signing and meet and greet.
What’s most remarkable now is how assured Others sounds, which, considering its gestation, was hardly a given.
Famously, the band was frustrated by the initial material that it wrote (“We couldn’t write successfully for the first year,” then-lead vocalist Tim Smith told the Observer in January 2010), a frustration born as much as out of the band’s perfectionist tendencies as the pressure it felt following up its break-out second album, 2006’s The Trials of Van Occupanther.
Pressure produces either diamonds or dust, and Midlake rose to the challenge of deepening and expanding its sound with aplomb. What’s most striking, even 15 years later, is how dense and finely layered these songs are, little melodic filigrees of flute or guitar or percussion floating past in the background, as Smith’s reedy, passionate baritone anchoring each of the 11 songs here.
“Nobody’s harder on us than we are,” guitarist and current frontman Eric Pulido told the Observer in 2010.
The results spoke for themselves. “This is one deep, dark, beautiful record,” gushed NPR upon its release, while the BBC raved “The Courage of Others is a lovely, lovely record that doesn’t sound like it belongs in this age at all. It’s all the better for it.”
Midlake would evolve yet again for Others’ follow-up: Smith left the band to pursue a solo project in 2012, pushing Pulido to the front of the stage. The group’s fourth studio album, 2013’s Antiphon, was a dramatic shift away from the feathered folk-rock of Others and toward something more muscular and concise. The gap between albums four and five — 2022’s For the Sake of Bethel Woods — was considerable at nine years, but likewise proved worth the wait.
While the expectations for Midlake receded somewhat, particularly after Antiphon (which, given the personnel turnover, might have been as closely watched if not more so than Others), the band has found a way to channel its own notions about success in healthier, more sustainable ways, as keyboardist Jesse Chandler told the Independent in 2022 about the creation of Bethel Woods: “The whole process was a lot easier. You realize, it doesn’t have to be that hard. Every band is different. They work in different ways. We’ve finally arrived on something that works for us, after many years of getting there.”
