THE WIND-UP BIRDS have been flickering in and out of a scrappy black and white West Yorkshire drama from the 1980s for a few years now. Contenders. Worthy. Respect and so on. As they describe themselves: "standard four-piece (bass, drums, guitar, sarcasm)"
The songs are packed with words that spill anger, fondness, wisdom, sadness and horror. All the lyrics are on the website. But don't read them. Listen. Listen hard. Let them pile up song by song. Don't fidget. Keep listening. Notice, for example "There Won't Always Be An England", a song that talks its way through a bleakly (but gently) contemporary version of Lenin's suggestion that sometimes a man's rigid thinking might need to be introduced to the pavement.
I won't mention "Nostalgic For…" If you can stick the full 7 minutes 13 you might need to pause and go for a walk before proceeding. It's the best track I've heard this year. Breathtaking. But you have to give it time. Don't go there first. Let Kroyd's (Paul Ackroyd) voice settle into you hearing. Listen as slowly as you can through tracks 1-4. Don't read yet. Make sure you know what he's on about through his voice. Get to know his style. Lean hard into the wind of desperate anti-climax as it crescendos. "Don't ever go back" he finishes. And you suddenly notice, in the silence, that the track has been screaming all kinds of weird noises at you and that this is not a "standard four piece" at all. Not one bit.
The relative lightness of "Wonder St" that follows lets you draw breath. And then you can move onto something warmer and more open "Escape From New Yorkshire" is a literary excursion into emergence from working class childhood in West Yorkshire. Sort of "Kes", but with "all these repercussions" instead of the evil brother.
And there's "Tyre Fire", nearly five minutes of epic Jeremy Kyle with the truth and humans left in. THE WIND-UP BIRDS aren't trying to do anything. They're just doing it. Praise be
