Noah And The Whale

In the early January of last year, Charlie Fink set to work on Noah and the Whale's third album. Holed up in a synagogue in East London, he had little to begin with — a few fragments, a sketch for a 10-minute song that resembled Street Hassle, and a set of lyrics begun on a New Year's Day train from Wales to London. But what little there was seemed to suggest the beginnings of something quite special, something markedly different to the songs they had written before.

The continued maturation of Noah and the Whale has been a pleasing thing to follow — from the joyous burst of their debut, Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down, through the lovelorn sobriety of The First Days of Spring, it now reaches a kind of fruition on Last Night on Earth.