The Kissaway Trail

With the clanging of church bells leading the tumultuous charge into the panoramic sensation of their new album “SLEEP MOUNTAIN”, The Kissaway Trail have returned with a renewed sense of purpose. “Sleep Mountain” is less a reinvention for the Danish quintet than a fabulous progression in the wake of its predecessor, 2007’s already grandstanding self-titled debut.

The overall theme of Sleep Mountain, says Thomas Fagerlund, is

“about being a dreamer and sticking to your dreams regardless of the efforts of people trying to wake us up… Sleep Mountain symbolises staying true to your opinions and beliefs.” The first album’s theme of, “love between boys and girls,” he says, has broadened out to, “a love of mankind and our generation – those who have the same passion for art, and the love we feel towards our family and friends.”

In turn, Søren Corneliussen pinpoints his predilection for, “grief, loss and love, but written from a bystander’s point of view… My new lyrics are about sentiments and pictures in my mind that seems to linger on indefinitely. They’re more of a collage than a story but they’re still thoughts and images from the real life.”

The 12 songs that make up Sleep Mountain came together at the second attempt. They started writing and recording in early 2008; “the only rule was to write as many songs as possible.”

Thus armed, they rehearsed in a desolate rented farm close to their home in Odense (Denmark’s third largest city, situated on the island of Funen) before shifting to the French mountains to narrow down their material. In late 2008, they began recording in Sweden and Denmark but two months later, “we discovered it did not sound the way we had intended and we were afraid that it never would!”

So they started again, from scratch, at Odense’s Lydkraft Studio where they’d recorded the first album. They had just two weeks to nail this one, “but as we laid down the first drum track, we knew we had made the right decision.”

Likewise, working with American producer Peter Katis (Interpol, The National, The Twilight Sad, Fanfarlo). He couldn’t work with them at the first attempt due to having a child on the way but he was free for the Lydkraft sessions. “We told him we simply could not imagine our record being the way we wanted it to without him on board. Fortunately he accepted.”

Sleep Mountain has that satisfyingly deep, rounded Katis sound, and none more so than that bell-clanging six-minute intro ‘SDP’. As Thomas says, it’s the perfect opener, “because it sounds like us, but still shows we have evolved.”

Evidence of evolution can also be found in the acute hooks of ‘New Year’ and the brilliant, euphoric ‘Beat Your Heartbeat’. Alongside ‘Philadelphia’ (Neil Young cover), ‘Painter’, ‘Friendly Fire’ and ‘Whirr Of Wings’ show a more restrained Kissaway Trail, while ‘Three Million Hours’ is a very poignant end to a tour de force 55 minutes. In the end, it’s a positive outcome. As the words of ‘Philadelphia’ has it, “Sometimes I think that I know / What love’s all about / And when I see the light / I know I’ll be all right.”

They play King Tuts this Sunday, tickets are here!

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