Based on my experience today, Penguin Cafe’s fifth studio album, Rain Before Seven, is marvelous music for the morning after the night before, or, in fact, any sunny day where you’ve given yourself a holiday, a little time off. 

If you’re already a Penguin Cafe, or Penguin Cafe Orchestra fan, and know, musically, what to expect, the LP, perhaps, doesn’t immediately demand your full attention. However, while its spinning, gently as a piece of pleasant BGM, it has plenty of moments that, Inception-like, lift your mood. Set your spirits dancing. Take the nod to Ennio Morricone’s score for Once Upon A Time In The West on the opener, Welcome To London. Surrounded by cinematic strings, the haunting melody of Man With A Harmonica is here revamped on melodica by bandleader, Arthur Jeffes. Or In Re Budd, whose balaphon barrels around to a ridiculously boisterous b-line. The combination of electric and contrabass creating a bouncing tuba-like burping. On Galahad, the symphonic synergy of massed cello, violin, and viola, start out summoning Ryuichi Sakamoto’s The Sheltering Sky, before buzzing like a honey bee, and then cycling, spiraling upwards into the blue. The patterns of repetition recalling past glories, such as Perpetuum Mobile, and painting pictures of positive landscapes, bathed in golden hues. 

In the press release for the record Jeffes talks a lot about a new need for playfulness and fun. Written in and out of COVID lockdowns, the album has optimism at its heart. It’s title is taken from the old English weather saying “Rain before 7… Fine by 11”. The belief in a brighter day ahead, and the willing of this into being, is characterized by tracks such as the crazy – but still kinda polite – carnival samba of Find Your Feet. Its dizzying, delirious orchestral arrangement. Lamborghini 754 features a beat that Arthur calls “near electronic”, and in its plucked, classical chords, I can hear the hook of Sabres Of Paradise’s Smokebelch. Maybe that’s just me, but now that I’ve noticed, it’s stuck.* The closing Goldfinch Yodel is a real return to the sheer joy of previous peaks, timeless highs, like Air A Danser and Music For A Found Harmonium. Its jaunty Irish jig making best friends with a Malian griot, and the ease with which they mix fueling my my interest / obsession with music being our common root. An ancestral connection. The magic that links, joins, us all. 

Notes

*The Sabres` Andrew Weatherall was a champion of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Recommending their music in his “The Outsider” column, in “Acid House’s village newspaper”, Boys Own – as he pleaded with people to open their minds to tunes outside of dance’s confines. 

Penguin Cafe’s Rain Before Seven… is out now on Erased Tapes.