admiral fallow – tiny rewards

If I were to eat it it’d definitely go well with a nice full-bodied red.

Admiral Fallow – Tiny Rewards

This is far from an unpleasant album to listen to, the vocals are outstanding, smooth and silky.  Well paced, with lush harmonisation, and some nice instrumental touches that, whilst over the top in places – I feel – really add to the overall effect.

I don’t know whether I’m surprised or not by…

Give me a Scottish band with noticeable Scottish accents while singing, and there’s a good chance I’ll love ‘em (see my obsession with Frightened Rabbit). Admiral Fallow is no different. Their 2015 release, Tiny Rewards, is a new direction for the band - but my goodness, is it a good one. Everything you loved about Admiral Fallow in their previous releases is still there: Louis Abbott’s beautiful voice, the clarinet to name a few, but everything just seems amplified. The sound is fuller, a grander instrumental vision with some synth goodness thrown in for good measure. Not to mention, Abbot himself gives nods to such acts as Feist, Sufjan Stevens and The National in several songs. Be still my heart. 

Admiral Fallow

“Holding The Strings”

ART BLANCHE: Tiny Rewards

“Expansive and evocative” was how designer Nic Burrows described Admiral Fallow’s sound -- an important understanding in his mind.

“I like to base music artwork on listening to the music and trying to translate the feeling of it or the mood through visuals,” he explained.

As a member of the studio/collective Nous Vous, Nic was hired to produce the art for Tiny Rewards, Admiral Fallow's upcoming record, as well as the single "Evangeline."

"The cover for the album is a subtly manipulated image of cliffs/sea... It came from the idea of creating altered or fictitious landscapes from existing found photographs. There is a theme of duality within the album so the land/sea cover seemed to capture that."

Courtesy of Admiral Fallow’s website.

The key in developing this design? Communication. This was Nous Vous' first time working with Admiral Fallow, so they put great emphasis on making sure they were always on the same page with the band.

"In this case the band gave us a visual starting point. We used their visual references to understand what they wanted and then did our own take on that," Nic said. "Once they saw some of the early ideas [they] picked some and were happy for us to go ahead with it.”

"We did about five initial sketches for possible directions, then from that we had another round of tightening it up/narrowing down options. There are always options at each stage, so I’ll work on a few different images in the same style and then the band will pick the one they like best."

What resulted is an image that is both captivating and, to be honest, a little confusing. Their manipulations warp perspective to a point of apparent distortion, but not to a level of total abstraction. It's taunting in a way:  it feels like you can almost tell what you're looking at.

For the single "Evangeline," this visual trickery is front-and-center.

"The ‘river’ is nonexistent," Nic explained. "It came out of the manipulating process, which was all done using photocopiers without any Photoshop."

But the point is to not worry about what and where the subject is (Nic doesn't even know where most of the photos they used were of), but rather to focus on the feeling it represents.

"I suppose a subtle idea is that across the singles/album and other stuff you get an idea of a certain weird landscape, that the songs may or may not relate to, adding a visual layer to [the music]."

Because as much as the music shaped the art, the art can shape the music.

-Dylan Singleton