(Indie Pop, Dreampop) By the Sea - Endless Days, Crystal Sky - 2014, MP3, 320 kbps

As Bill Ryder-Jones’ backing band, By the Sea always had potential; but the five-piece opt to tread a different path from the former Coral man as they step further out of his shadow on their second LP. Endless Days, Crystal Sky is more in line with fellow Liverpudlians Echo & The Bunnymen, and a template of jangling guitars and world-weary vocals set amid spacious backdrops is quickly established. ‘These Days Fall’ is coated in melancholy that recalls Simple Minds, but it doesn’t last long. More hopeful melodies shine through ‘Youth”s playful nursery rhyme hooks and the glam-flecked ‘The Stranger Things’.
By the Sea wear their obvious influences well on an album that enriches their city’s canon of melodic guitar pop.
When frontman Liam Power sings of being “lost inside the forgotten sea,” there’s no doubt which waterway he means: the Mersey Estuary, home of jangling guitars, drowsy vocals, dreams of The Byrds and Love relocated to a wetter West Coast, a fantasy stretching through Shack in the 1980s to The Coral in the 2000s.
It’s a tradition that has fallen from view in recent years but the Wirral quintet mount a strong case for it on their second album, Endless Days Crystal Sky. Songs have depth and warmth, at times surging forward hopefully, elsewhere conveying an aching sense of melancholy, while synthesisers add a modern gloss to the nostalgia