Midlake's 'A Bridge to Far' is a tour-de-force folk-leaning psychedelic album

“Climb upon a bridge to far, go anywhere your heart desires.” The key phrase from the title track of Midlake’s sixth studio album conveys the perception that anything is within reach should an appropriate mind-set be attained. However, later on the album there are references to a “lion’s den” and “war within the valley of roselesss thorns,” a setting where “power and glory were in store.”

It seems, then, that this is a realm where escaping to a place called “far” is necessary for self-protection. Midlake singer and frontman Eric Pulido has said of the album’s "The Calling" that the song “has to do with my own struggle with applying myself towards a given effort; denying or embracing that which we were made to do.” Another track, “The Ghouls,” concerns “the temptation to demonize the realities or challenges that exist and yet to face them head on and create something extraordinary.”

In contrast with the heaviness of these thematic difficulties, A Bridge to Far is sonically light, the analogue of the sun dissolving glowering clouds. So much so that the 10 tracks the Denton, Texas sextet have assembled over the album’s 38 minutes can be appreciated solely for what they are musically: crisp, top-notch folk-leaning psychedelia with overt jazz leanings. It all sounds like Midlake: hazy, a little distant, with yearning melodies. There are fewer potential musical touchstones than their last album 2022’s For the Sake of Bethel Woods, with its Woodstock Festival-referencing title and intimations of Echo & The Bunnymen, Mercury Rev and The Moody Blues. Here, the only possible kinship is with David Crosby’s 1971 impressionistic tour-de-force If I Could Only Remember my Name.

And, fittingly, living with A Bridge to Far since late August suggests it is as much a tour-de-force as Midlake’s previous archetypal milestone, 2013’s Antiphon. The band formed in 1999, lost their key songwriter and frontman Tim Smith in 2012 and yet here they are, after more than two decades in existence, firing on all cylinders. Astonishing.

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