Sweet Billy Pilgrim
Crown and Treaty
Release Date: Apr 16, 2012
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: EMI
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Album Review: Crown and Treaty by Sweet Billy Pilgrim
Great, Based on 3 Critics
Based on rating 4/5
After a surprise 2009 Mercury prize nomination for their second album, Twice Born Men, Sweet Billy Pilgrim frontman Tim Elsenburg gave up being an odd-job man to focus on his band full-time. That move has paid off handsomely, as Crown and Treaty is at times wonderful, particularly on "Blue Sky Falls", "Joyful Reunion" and "Brugada". By parts atmospheric, experimental and dramatic, it finds a happy midpoint between the chamber pop sensibilities of Rufus Wainwright, Radiohead's ingenious arrangements and Elbow's epic crescendos, the addition of a vocal foil in Jana Carpenter adding extra hues to Elsenburg's palette.
Based on rating B
Crown And Treaty is the third album in a nine-year tenure from UK outfit Sweet Billy Pilgrim. The original trio of singer-guitarist-songwriter Tim Elsenburg, bassist Anthony Bishop, and drummer Alistair Hamer has been given an extra dimension with the addition of US-born guitarist and singer Jana Carpenter. The band tends to garner critical acclaim at will, trading in a curious yet convincing fusion of art-rock progressive bombast tempered with jazz time signatures and folk influences.
Opinion: Excellent
A simply glorious new album from Buckinghamshire’s premier experimental outfit. Sid Smith 2012 It’s been three years since the release of Sweet Billy Pilgrim’s Mercury Prize-nominated album, Twice Born Men, an eclectic mix of folkish tropes and indie-rock-orientated musing. Yet appropriately enough for a band whose name is taken from a character in a Kurt Vonnegut novel who became “unstuck in time”, the group have unhooked themselves from any particular genre, presenting instead a captivating mix that moves freely between supposed boundaries or categories.