Two years on from the highly acclaimed Until the Colours Run, this so far under-appreciated Newcastle band have released their third album, Beings, and it is a minor masterpiece of dynamics, atmosphere, lyrical intelligence, and intimacy.
Produced and mixed by guitarist Paul Gregory, lead singer Hazel Wilde is the main focus throughout, upon which the music hinges and flourishes. She naturally aims to impart a sense of yearning for something greater in the world, more than just the shallow celebrity and bite-size culture she believes has far too great a prominence in our modern world. Her dark and insightful imagination running a slow-motion riot throughout; there’s loads of lyrical gems to be found, as she attempts to map out some kind of sense of both hers and our worlds. Until the Colours Run (a title which may have had the misfortune of sometimes being interpreted as a comment on washing machine issues) had a more lethargic tone, but here her voice is generally more evocative and forceful, as it moves effortlessly between husky-drowsy growls to a powerful Sinead O’Connor sounding force, with The Cocteau Twins Elisabeth Fraser perhaps another signpost. With a band that can change gear seamlessly from forbidding beauty to dense foreboding, together as one, they have created something charged with an alternating icy grandeur and dynamic energy.
A quiet burst of radio static opens proceedings on the foreboding Of Dust and Matter, before leading into typically evocative, and gently swelling atmospheric beats, textures and rhythms. “I’m spitting out the dust, for all of us, but I keep the best inside” and “last night I passed out on the kitchen floor, with a drink in my hand, and a song in my heart” are just two of the lyrical beauties in this song, as Wilde attempts to paint picture of the push and pull within us all: “In my greatness I vowed to destroy all I am,” Wilde sings. “It brings out the best in me.” Jangly guitars, in sync with an ominous drumbeat soon makes way for some agitated piano and thunderous drums, before the song abruptly becoming deceptively serene again. It’s this kind of dynamics, prevalent in almost every song here, that helps to create a dazzling succession of composite pieces that grip and sustain our interest. In I'll Stall Them, their swooping and soaring sound, that includes rumbling drums, horns, piano, guitar and bass, coalesce perfectly in creating an audio picture, for the listener to paint what ever they wish. “I wanna walk with the brave, give me a good day, I want to feel human. I want to sing in a crowd, I want to live now,” sings Wilde in this heartfelt plea for connection and community, for those who want to let the lyrics guide their thoughts.
On Fault lines (check out the cinematic yet desperately sad video that accompanies it) the piano melody and driving bass provide the foundation for one of the more conventional song structures here. Again, some of the lyrics take your breath away in their elegant yet foreboding tone: “full blooded words like knives, but it’s not the same since the old girl died” and “fractured lives like faultiness, unto the breach my friends if you will.” Within songs, and between songs, the pace changes judiciously, and never frenetically. On The Crawl, desert sun-kissed guitar and piano lead the way, the steady martial style drums mimicking the song’s title for a while; forward, but slowly, as the guitars build into a crescent doing glissando, a recurring feature of the music, before dovetailing back to where we were at the beginning.
Breaking things up a bit is the short and more minimalist affair that is Send Me Home, while the equally short but much more urgent Through the Cellar Door sees the sound leaping here and there, back and forth, guitar heavily distorted and upfront at one point in tandem with crashing drums. The songs euphoria is particularly aurally thrilling, as only shorter pieces can generally only be.
The title track itself is the big one here, in terms of length and epic intent; all the aforementioned dynamics and styles are distilled here, as the song goes through several phases, but moving along like a rolling mist; stately, magisterial and yet both comforting and unsettling.
Beings, the album, is one of those increasingly rare beasts, an album made up of songs that all work on their own, but together add up to much much more. It deserves to be listened to as such.
Jeff Hemmings