This Is the Sea

This is the Sea is an album of ‘Big Music’, a term used by frontman and songwriter Mike Scott to describe the depth and space he hoped to capture in each and every track on the album.

The expansive majesty of the album all began in Mike Scott’s ‘book of shadows’, a book used by witches to record spells and rituals. According to him,

“One wild January day, when the wind charged like stampedes of wild horses down the mighty avenues, I walked down a narrow backstreet and discovered the most curious shop I’d ever seen. It was a witches' store, its shelves filled with potions, grimoires, scraps of wood, bark and root and numberless weird things I had no words or names for. And as I squinted around this dark space my eye was attracted by a massive, enigmatic-looking black-bound book.”

That grimoire would serve as the home for the roots of one of the most classic and majestic albums of all time. According to Scott, he had 30 or 40 songs prepared for the album, riding high on a creative surf unlike any other, all of them kept in his book.

The album is perhaps best described by writer Wyndham Wallace in a 25th anniversary album review & interview with Scott.

But though This Is The Sea is a modern record born of wonder at what surrounds us, it employs a vocabulary that is at times antiquated – never twee, however – and calls upon writers that inspired Scott such as Yeats and Blake, Keats and C.S. Lewis, Burns and Joyce. It rejects rock’s more commonplace language without fear of alienating those unfamiliar with such a style, and in so doing lends the album a charming gravitas and a timeless quality that match its themes. Part of its appeal, however, lies in the fact that it is far from blind to the world’s problems, its optimism and love balanced by an acknowledgement of the evil prevalent around us. It is, in other words, a mature vision of the world, viewed through a far from rose-tinted lens.