The Rainy Kingdom

“The Rainy Kingdom is a collection of bittersweet, beautifully melodic songs.” – The Independent

Lucky Elephant’s second album The Rainy Kingdom is available now from  Sunday Best Store

After making their “fun, playful, lo-fi, higgledy-piggledy” first album completely DIY, this time around they enlisted the help of a producer, Paul Butler (Michael Kiwanuka, Devendra Banhart, The Bees etc). A fresh pair of ears proved extremely useful. “We’re naturally quite democratic and collaborative, and it’s not one person’s vision, which is a reaction to people obsessively making music on their own. But the problem with that is you end up with too many elements. Paul actually helped us strip away some of the mad noises and teach us that less is more, and show which the important part of the song is. We’re not a brave band, we’re not confrontational with each other, we write harmoniously, so we needed a producer to tell us what worked and what didn’t work. It’s like that cliché: a good book doesn’t tell you everything.”

The album is preceded by the release of the track “British Working Man”, which was nearly the title track, “…but I didn’t want to spend a year explaining to people that it’s not a BNP record.” The song is accompanied by a stop-motion animation video set in a recognisably modern London (the DLR and the London Eye are both visible, as is an Apple laptop), depicting the life and repetitive routine of an office drone (imagine a Plasticene version of Jonathan Pryce’s character in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil). The visual style will evoke nostalgic associations with – depending upon your generation – Trumpton/Chigley/Camberwick Green, Postman Pat or Bob The Builder, all set in an ordered society where everything turns out alright. In Lucky Elephant’s world, however, there’s always the unsettling suggestion that  things won’t turn out so well: the sight of a passenger plane passing overhead is accompanied by the sound of a WW2 bomber.

Warm and benign on the surface, but carrying a resonant, poignant, often dark tale: that’s Rainy Kingdom – and Lucky Elephant – in microcosm.