Sussed London trio THE EARLY YEARS have been loitering with purposeful intent within the indie shadows of late and certainly making heads turn round at W&H Towers thanks to a string of fantastic, if relatively low-key singles.
And the great news is that they’ve pulled it all together for the Motherlode that is their eponymously-titled debut album: the sort of acid-tinged, psychedelic indie guitar beauty we’d begun to think had disappeared off the horizon since the much-vaunted Nu-shoegaze thing fell apart like an old pair of smelly Converse sneakers.
So yes, we’re talking opiated here, but for once it’s a sonic indulgence worth getting hooked on. Opener ‘All Ones & Zeros” is drone-y, pulsating, motorik and moody, looming in somewhere between early Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Can’s sinewy logic and ‘Storm In Heaven’-era Verve. It’s hypnotic stuff and produced with mesmeric clarity by Death In Vegas’s Tim Holmes, although the remainder of the album is left in the equally capable hands of Pat Collier, who – thanks to his previous work with the likes of The House Of Love – also knows how to get the best out of lovelorn, guitar-squalling indie boys.
It shows, too, because TEY barely put a foot wrong thereafter. Sometimes they strain hard at the rock leash on tunes like the muscular, insistent ‘The Simple Solution’ and ‘So Far Gone’, where the guitars are searing, serrated and set on stun, yet still fail to disguise the band’s obvious love of great pop. More often that not, though, they score with lonely, crestfallen beauties such as ‘Brown Hearts’, where David Malkinson and Roger Mackin chorus “I don’t know what to do with myself today”, simultaneously choking back tears and succumbing to the raging crescendo that ultimately consumes the song.
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Elsewhere, the band’s natural, narcotic allure is dipped in the Southern delta on the Spiritualized-style country-tinged ‘Things’; the gentle, cyclical pulsing and backwards masking of ‘Musik Der Fruhen Jahre’ reminds of Tortoise’s best repetitive reverie and – perhaps best of all – they treat us to the gorgeously fragile Fender Jaguars, Mo Tucker-style drum rumbles and angelic harmonies of ‘Song For Elizabeth’ which then rambles magnificently off into ambient space along the lines of Sonic Youth’s ‘Diamond Sea’. Head music and then some.
Just to sell us a perverse dummy, they even drag acoustic guitars out for the gorgeously resigned finale of ‘This Ain’t Happiness’ although even this gradually builds into something with spiritual, redemptive qualities and an expansive sonic canvas all in its’ own sweet time. It’s the perfect postscript for a terrific debut album that rushes excitingly on its’ run and results in surely one of the sweetest highs you can buy across the counter all year.
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