"They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad", wrote Philip Larkin. It's a quote that your reviewer remembers Richey Manic last appropriating. Let's hope Leeds outfit WHOLE SKY MONITOR don't feel the same urge to take their art to such nihilistic ends.
Because certainly "We Grow Up" revels in an intensity that this writer hadn't been expecting. If you include the two versions of the title track, there are five tunes here and very little sunshine permeating the clouds on the horizon.
"We Grow Up" itself broods its' way into life, featuring a guitar sensurround weirdly akin to Red House Painters. Its' negative lyrical content includes the aforementioned Larkin quote (the radio edit drops it, surely defeating the object?), though it does buck up a little for the chorus and finds WSM doing a credibly broiling Radiohead before they loom towards the fade.
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The other three tunes, "The Chosen", "On A Roll" and "Horizon" all nearly buckle under the weight of big questions. The propulsive, religion-dissing "The Chosen" is probably the pick of them, by some ways the most anthemic thing here, although I do harbour a sneaking liking for the malnourished "Horizon" which truly basks in its' own grim inevitablity (sample lyric: " we touch and disintegrate") and is actually bloody good.
As I said earlier, not what I'd been expecting, though I can't quite qualify that statement with an explanation. Whatever, Whole Sky Monitor are a slightly dour, but potentially quite obsessive proposition.
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