Volume V follows on five years after their fourth album For Your Love, a record lovingly nurtured but then swallowed up by the Covid pandemic.The title signifies the latest chapter in the ongoing story of Other Lives, their fifth record of magnificent musical and emotional depth. From the first notes of the opening track and lead single ‘Mystic,’ it’s clear that the cinematic breadth of their arrangements and melodies had risen several dynamic notches, with a fuller orchestrated reach and more towering drama across the album’s eight songs and two instrumentals – evidence of the band’s hunger to keep progressing while retaining the essence of what makes Other Lives so unique and irresistible. The majority of Volume V was recorded in The Sheerar, a former church that is now the Stillwater History Museum. The Sheerar’s acoustics partly accounts for the album’s more cathedral-esque take on Other Lives’ signature sound, which has the roots in a form of Americana but expanded via classical and post-classical forms, and the influence of iconic composers such as Ennio Morricone and Henry Mancini. Given the five-year gaps between the last three Other Lives albums, the band plan to follow up Volume V more swiftly with a sixth and seventh chapter; a promise of more magic and magnificence to come. “I see Volume V as the beginning of Other Lives’ second act,” Jesse concludes. “We’re all getting older, and we have some regrets about not putting out more music – so this might be our Neil Young phase! Releasing more music over a shorter space of time.”
