Late Landing – ‘Odyssey’ – album review

Around the turn of the century, me and my mate Adam finished second in a Dundee all-city karaoke semi-final. We sang ‘Parklife’ by Blur, Adam as Phil Daniels and me in the Damon role. We lost, fair and square, to a woman who phoned in a delicious version of Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer’. What instantly drew me to Late Landing was that they went one better, making the final of the Metal 2 The Masses competition, also held in the City of Discovery. And they’ve got a new album out.

‘Odyssey’ is an apt title for a record by a band from the northeast of Scotland who’ve been hammering away at it for 20 years and who’ve mined some of the best back catalogues in the business with a pickaxe and some dynamite. It took me a few minutes to twig what the riff on 60-second-long opener ‘Revelries’ was reminding me of, which turned out to be Echo Beach by Martha and the Muffins. 

‘The Time Is Now’ had me bobbing my head here in the kitchen (where, alas, I’ve been banished to as the rest of the family goggle Traitors), and I enjoyed the frequent change in pace from the death metal chorus to the U2 verses. I accidently knocked the hoover over with my foot at 1:40 when the best 100 seconds of music I’ve heard this year kicked in. 

There’s more than a shot of Evanescence in ‘Sinking Feeling’, ‘Grand Illusions’ is a ring-entrance theme if ever I heard one, and the whole thing continues in the form of tunes that I wouldn’t search for, necessarily, but certainly wouldn’t skip if they shuffled on. The guitars on this album, incidentally, are superb. God, there’s my head bobbing again like I’m dooking for apples!

The only track I wasn’t really fussed for out of the eight on offer was ‘All at Once’, and I can’t really say why other than it made me wrinkle my eyebrows. Then it was back to Echo Beach for the closing track, an 11-minute-plus instrumental that changed direction as many times as any epic odyssey should. I righted the hoover so I could kick it over again.

There’s so much going on here, and not a lot of it is new, but so what? Sorry, the UK’s largest inland saltwater basin, but Late Landing are now my favourite thing about Montrose.