Simply Beautiful: Cloud Castle Lake Interviewed

Dublin trio with incredible promise...

The sheer weight, the volume of new music being created is frightening. The sound of a thousand bands clanging together isn't something to be recommended, with that unwieldy, often terrifying noise bubbling across the web on a daily basis.

It takes something special to cut through the haze, a golden, illuminating voice to peer through the mist. Cloud Castle Lake do this effortlessly, with the sheer individuality of their approach allowing the band to stand apart from their peers, to lay down borders, to characterise sounds.

Speaking to singer Daniel McAuley, it's clear that this isn't something to be rushed. The group formed almost six years ago, and took time to gain the skills necessary to re-create the sounds they heard in their heads.

“It's been developing, I guess, the whole time,” he muses. “We wouldn't have been a million miles away when we started but I guess it's a bit more polished, a bit more experienced. We started off very ambitious as well, so it's just catching up to what we wanted it to sound like back then.”

The word 'ambition' appears and re-appears throughout our conversation, but it's not ambition in the manner, say, of conquering the charts and gaining gold records – it's ambition in a sonic sense, of conjuring and creating new identities. Taking their time, the three piece have been reluctant to release material until they felt it was truly ready to be heard.

“I mean, interest has kind of been coming in waves over the years,” he says. “There might be quite a bit of interest at one time, and it feels like it's a crest, but then we end up shirking away from releasing something. We just weren't really ready at the time. We were terrified to release something before it was ready.”

Having the confidence to turn offers down has been key to their development. Daniel sings in falsetto, an unusual yet incredibly beautiful style which seems to resonate amidst their vast, electronic-tinged arrangements. “I think ever since I've started I've tried to push it – whether that's pushing the pitch as high as I can go or just the power of it. When you do that you can break up a bit, get a bit raw. Which I guess is the aim as well, sometimes. Sometimes you want a bit of grit.”

Debut EP 'Dandelion' arrived last year, marking the trio out as a quite special new group. There were shades of Wild Beasts in the material – partly due to the artfulness of the songwriting and partly due to their willingness to try something different, odd, uncanny. “They were kind of old ones that I've had in a pretty basic form and then I've polished them off,” he says. “After a while you forget what they mean, you're just speaking words. I think a little bit of it was nostalgia, something to do with the way I thought now would be when I was a certain age.”

This aspect of recollection seems to linger within Cloud Castle Lake. The band are almost continually writing, with these scraps, these wisps, later gathered into a cohesive whole. “I'm always taking notes. There are always lots of incomprehensible things that I write down and then forget what they mean. I wouldn't write a huge amount, usually in little spurts, or usually little lines – like, lots of little lines which don't really go anywhere but sometimes become full songs.”

New single 'Glacier' is a stunning return; buoyed by that powerful, keening vocal, the trio craft an arrangement so redolent of atmosphere that it's almost impossible not to view their music in visual terms. It's the sound, though, of a band running entirely on feeling. “There wasn't any particular thought behind that, I guess, it was just the way it turned out. Usually they're pretty visual so I guess it kind of adds to an atmosphere, evokes certain images as opposed to just getting straight emotions across.”

Finishing, I ask Daniel about the band's name. “It's a short story by Vladimir Nabokov. There's a Penguin edition with a collection of short stories. I was just flicking in the back and it just seemed like a nice name.”

It's all too fitting, I argue: three components bound by this commitment to beauty. He replies, almost embarrassed: “well, it wasn't exactly planned…”

Photo Credit: Rich Gilligan

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'Glacier' is out now.

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