Sand & Snow

A Silent Film made their first album as an Oxford record on purpose. The City That Sleeps was written and recorded in the city, produced by Sam Williams, who had worked with Supergrass, and mastered there too. Then came America: a US release in 2010, a year of touring and a move to Phoenix. Sand & Snow, the band’s second album, came out on 5 June 2012 on Creative Media Investments, and the drummer Spencer Walker has no doubt about where it came from. It is, he said, an album shaped by their travels around the country.

This time they produced it themselves. Walker told Popdose that the debut had needed a producer to pull a set of very different songs into the sound of one band, but a year on the road had taught them how they wanted to arrange things, and the singer Robert Stevenson and the guitarist Karl Bareham had been engineering for years. “I don’t know if it was an arrogant decision,” he added. The sessions took place in the Arizona desert, which Walker called the polar opposite of growing up in Oxford. Stevenson recorded some vocals outdoors, running cables into a dry riverbed, and remembered a noisy owl in a tree; Walker wasn’t sure those takes survived. A friend brought them a rattlesnake’s rattle to record, which proved too hard to capture. Alan Moulder and Catherine Marks mixed the album.

Stevenson writes the lyrics, but the first single started elsewhere. The string and synth riff of “Danny, Dakota & the Wishing Well” came from the bassist Ali Hussain while Stevenson was back in the UK; the other three added drums, guitar and bass and sent it over, and two days later he returned it arranged, with words he had written in a day. Its video followed at the end of June. “Harbour Lights” was the second single, and in Chicago in February 2013 Stevenson led the crowd through its five-note riff again and again. “This Stage Is Your Life” borrows the language of the theatre for life itself. “Love Takes a Wrecking Ball” carries the record’s strongest electronic streak, and Stevenson described it as tearing a house down in order to build it again. “Rustle of the Stars”, built on acoustic guitar, is the most low-key song here, and “Thousand Mile Race” closes the album at 5:23.

On the 2013 tour, Popstache’s Craig Bechtel heard a band drawing on the anthemic new wave of the 1980s, with Simple Minds and U2 in the mix and an earnest baritone out front. The comparisons that had followed them since the debut, Coldplay, Snow Patrol and the Killers, kept coming, and Stitched Sound added Keane. The band talked about the record in terms of a crowd. Asked about the balance between the fast, energetic songs and the slow ones, Walker said there had been no plan beyond liking people to dance, and Stevenson put it down to the ups and downs of life. Walker also said a four-night residency in Las Vegas had loosened them up, and that Stevenson would fix on anyone in the crowd who didn’t look like they were having fun until they were.

The response came mostly from smaller outlets and from audiences on the road. Stitched Sound called it a strong follow-up, Popdose praised the care in the studio and the more confident writing, and PJ Media’s Jonathan Sanders put it among ten favourite records of 2012 that he expected year-end lists to miss. A deluxe edition with three more songs followed in September 2013.

The gamble of producing themselves paid off, because the record belongs to the band they had become in America rather than the one a producer had shaped in Oxford. Its 1980s ambitions are out in the open, and the faster songs are steadied by the slower ones, so the album doesn’t run on adrenaline alone. There is nothing cynical in it, and that is hard to hold against it. It is not subtle and doesn’t try to be, and the crowds singing “Harbour Lights” back at Stevenson in 2013 didn’t need it to be. A Silent Film made one more album, a self-titled record in 2015, before Stevenson and Walker put the band on an indefinite break in 2018.