Sweet Billy Pilgrim

The music of Sweet Billy Pilgrim is first and foremost, staggeringly beautiful. But it’s a shy beauty – a lingering ambience and a distant clicking in the night, church windows built from littered glass, love songs that look to the day when even the children are forgotten. Strangers tell you their heartbreaks. Fountains toss back their coins. And just when you start to feel skeptical, in shambles singer Tim Elsenburg – shaggy and dour, wringing joy from his melodies with a bashful croak and a glorious croon. Sweet Billy Pilgrim are exemplars of English atmospheric art-pop, and it’s natural that they would release their second album, Twice Born Men, on David Sylvian’s SamadhiSound label. Even compared to a Radiohead or an Elbow, Sweet Billy Pilgrim achieve a sublime balance between their hooks and their moods, their ambitions and their humility. They also have a sense of humour. Elsenburg is still smacking himself for telling an interviewer that Twice Born Men, is a love album – but "not in a Barry White way."  It's a fair description.  Twice Born Men, “is a kind of concept album, in the loosest sense,” says Elsenburg. “It starts at the end of the heart's little journey and then works its way back to the beginning, which is actually the end anyway.” In the years since their 2005 debut, We Just Did What Happened And No One Came, they’ve remixed Sylvian, Steve Jensen, and Steve Adey, toured to international acclaim, including a celebrated appearance at the Punkt Festival (both in Norway and London) and currently working with fellow British artist Adem on a commission for the BBC. The trio of Elsenburg, Anthony Bishop (bass, banjo), and Alistair Hamer (drums) strikes a balance between the loops and textures wrung from laptops, and the sharp tones of a banjo.   Bass clarinet and crisp guitar bring a ramshackle glory to the opening single, "Truth Only Smiles”; a tuned dishwasher introduces the treacherous love of "Kalypso." Elsenburg has explained his strategy: “I like it when a piece of music seems to grow from a number of points, with no one sound becoming the focus necessarily; everything carefully feeding the texture and the atmosphere. That way, when something does leap out of the mix – like a voice, say – the impact is all the greater.” Their love ballads, like love, are next to shapeless: take the dripping heartbreak of “Longshore Drift,” or the breeze-brushed guitar and exquisite afterglow of “Joy Maker Machinery.” The album closes with “There Will It End,” as a harmonium thick with church dust drones a hymn as Elsenburg overdubs his own voice 30 times to play the part of the congregation – “rich old lady, drunk old man, small child, wannabe opera singer, distracted teenager, tone-deaf miner.” It’s heavenly in spite of itself. In his review of We Just Did What Happened, Ian Mathers of Stylus wrote, "Sweet Billy Pilgrim's debut album has swallowed me whole." That's even more likely with Twice Born Men, a richer, sadder, and even more engrossing experience. Elsenburg sounds almost bashful explaining it – fearing it’ll sound pretentious, or pompous. But there’s nothing pompous about his conviction, or about those voices that close the album, all just average, shuffling people, and all just moments away from a gasping, all-engulfing love.   One of 12 nominees for the 2009 Mercury Music Awards. Sweet Billy Pilgrim on My Space http://www.myspace.com/sweetbillypilgrim