Are Lau about to bow out? Aidan O’Rourke on the significance of new album Midnight and Closedown

For 12 years Lau have been breaking down barriers with their intoxicating power folk. The noise around their new album suggests it may be their last, but it that really true, asks Jim Gilchrist

Lau, from left to right: Martin Green, Aidan O'Rourke and Kris Drever PIC: Genevieve Stevenson

Lau’s new album, released this week, is bursting with quirkily sophisticated arrangements and digitally tweaked instrumental textures, but its closing number, Riad, is sheer back to basics – the unadulterated strains of fiddle, accordion and guitar in an ambulatory melody that draws to a quiet close. It sounds rather like a gentle sign-off which, combined with the album title, Midnight and Closedown, suggests a certain finality: is this the celebrated power folk trio’s farewell?

An accompanying press release is a bit of a teaser, playing on the album’s enigmatic title and suggesting that it could be “Lau’s swansong” – or “could equally prove to be the opening of a brave new chapter.”

Over an intensely creative 12 years, fiddler Aidan O’Rourke, accordionist Martin Green and songwriting singer-guitarist Kris Drever have taken their music far beyond the accepted parameters of “folk,” taking advantage of electronic augmentation, collaborating with other, often non-traditional artists, from indie rockers to string quartets, and curating their own eclectic Lau-Land mini-festivals.

Ask O’Rourke, if they are indeed about to bow out and he grins – complicit, perhaps, in the ambiguity: “It’s definitely not the end of Lau,” he says. “We have reached an interesting point, though. We’re at a stage where we’ve been doing this for the last 12 years, more or less full time, and we want to present our music to the highest standards.

“We’ve made the mistake in the past of making albums that aren’t 100 per cent performable live.” Which was why they brought in producer John Parish, known for his work with PJ Harvey, Tracey Chapman and Sparklehorse. Certainly Midnight and Closedown, their fifth studio album, sounds as if they thoroughly enjoyed making it as they gleefully extract every possible texture and tonality from their electronically enhanced instruments.

Almost orchestral at times, the album’s soundworld ranges from the dark grinding of Echolalia or the wallowing bass undercurrent below Drever’s winsome singing in Toy Tigers to the “reverse tape” shimmer that couches the striking lyric imagery of I Don’t Want to Die Here, putting one in mind of Pepper-era Beatles. This last observation delights O’Rourke: “Other than maybe really hardcore old Irish traditional music, or someone like [young concertina virtuoso] Cormac Begley, the Beatles is what we’ve listened to most in the tour van.”

We’re talking in a café in Glasgow’s West End. The city is in thrall to its mammoth Celtic Connections festival, in which O’Rourke has been variously involved, including in a duo with emerging young piping star Brighde Chaimbeul and in his 365 collaboration with pianist Kit Downes and author James Robertson. Later this month he rejoins Drever and Green for an extensive English tour, promoting the new album.

“We played it live on our last tour before the album was released,” says O’Rourke, “and spent a lot of time pre-tour making sure that it was not only possible live, but fluid. We play every track and it’s a true representation.

“Martin’s become more and more fluent with his electronic element, which has made all the difference on a live basis. And all the sounds that he recreates are sounds that we make. They might be created by Kris whacking an old piano in a Shetland village hall or a noise I accidentally made on the fiddle which Martin captures during rehearsals then regurgitates.”

Again in that press release, O’Rourke suggested that the band were minded to make “a Brexit album.” Perhaps not overtly, but there are elements of isolation, disaffection and renunciation lacing these songs. Drever has described it as an album about islands – “big islands, little islands and human islands.” In She Put On Her Headphones, he sings: “There’s two sides to this story / Both of them are lies…”

“Without even mentioning the B-word, which I did in the press release,” says O’Rourke, “we started gathering material for this over a year ago and there was just no way of escaping the general political atmosphere. We’re all quite emotional writers and we absorb what’s going on round about us, and the only feeling for me was this disillusion and this isolation of living on the island of the UK, coming out of the independence referendum, which obviously disappointed us all, then into what happened with the Brexit referendum.

“I don’t write the words, so I come from a slightly more abstract direction, but my general feeling was that every note I played and wrote for it was about the current political climate. Although,” he adds quickly, “I don’t think the album’s really melancholic. It’s quite optimistic at times.”

Perhaps, he suggests, a further degree of isolationism was instilled by the fact that Midnight and Closedown, although recorded in East Lothian’s renowned Castlesound studio, was largely rehearsed in Shetland, where Drever now lives (O’Rourke is based in Edinburgh; Green in Pathhead, Midlothian).

The past dozen years have seen the trio come a long way from their initial sessions round a kitchen table in Leith, forging their fiery instrumental sets in Edinburgh’s Bongo Club and deciding on the name Lau – an old Orcadian word meaning light (as in “lowe” elsewhere in Lowland Scots).

Putting together that last, acoustic track on the new album felt very like the old days, O’Rourke muses: “We still got a great thrill from that acoustic music that we can perform without any pedals. I was determined to have at least one track on the album that was stripped back like that.”

So, as Closedown doesn’t mean shutdown, whither Lau this coming year? All of them have their own projects – Drever, for instance, has been busy in his own right during Celtic Connections, among other things appearing with fellow-songwriter Karine Polwart and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and has a 20-date tour this spring. Green, meanwhile, is in demand as a composer, recent projects having involved his Edinburgh Festival show, Flit, about migration and transience, and last year’s Aeons, involving the Orchestra of Opera North.

The immediate future sees them touring England, while another Lau-Land curation is scheduled for Aberdeen in June. “As we said in an interview years ago, Lau is the mothership,” O’Rourke reiterates, “and it remains so. Lau feels like home when we get together to make music. We’ve been through a lot together and there’s a kind of family feel to it.

“I think that when we come back to Lau, everything we’ve been doing feeds in.”

Midnight and Closedown is released on 8 February on Reveal Records.