Shoes and Socks Off – Miles of Mad Water

In a rough form, the latest album from Toby Hayes, the former Meet Me in St. Louis frontman, and sometime bass player for Shield Your Eyes, has been done for a while. When Tubelord were warming up to tour their most recent album, his latest creation was entirely written and demoed whilst he was supporting them. He got home, and took the songs apart: not because he didn’t like them, but because he seemingly didn’t want ‘just another’ Shoes and Socks Off album. Known for his newest project’s acoustic laments, for LP5 he decided to change things up a bit.

The songs were taken apart and then painstakingly reconstructed, something he alludes to on Miles of Mad Water‘s stirring fourth track, self-deprecatingly named All Mouth (as in ‘all mouth and no trousers’): ‘Self-deleting songs because every one sounds the same; a curse of self-doubt, I get lost in a crowd.’ It makes sense, then, that he would try and change things up, but in doing so seems to have carved out his own niche. This album’s sound is quite difficult to pin down, taking in things like electronica, orchestral pop, and of course, acoustic folk, but when that particular kind of music appears on Miles of Mad Water, it’s more often than not twisted and changed. Small things have been brought into the mix, and well, to quote lead single Tork Sport, ‘what a difference it makes’.

The album has an excellent flow, and the fact that many of its songs segue into each other further emphasises its cohesive nature, as does Hayes’s intensely personal (yet quite relatable) lyrics, which are still as reflective, and at times, as cutting, as they’ve ever been. Even when he ventures into fascinating new territory – Lockjaw is the closest he’s come to making a straight-up electro-pop song, and features an impressive chorus, the modestly-delivered ‘I’m just figuring it out / I’m just writing it all down’ – he does it with the sort of confidence that won’t be found anywhere in his lyrics. Even the straightforward Doppler Effect, which features only his voice and a guitar, benefits from the album context.

Each song on Miles of Mad Water plays off the ones it’s surrounded by, and this ensures that radical departures like the dazzling instrumental But No make perfect sense when heard as part of the bigger picture. Hayes’s fifth outing as Shoes and Socks Off is meant to be listened to as an album; only then is his vision revealed and able to be fully appreciated. He didn’t want this to be ‘just another’ album, and it’s brilliantly different to what’s come before, but it could also be his most accomplished solo record to date.

Tork Sport video:

Miles of Mad Water will be released on June 11th via Big Scary Monsters, and is available to pre-order now via their shop.