It’s largely been down to the shuffling lo-fi imaginations of the US that have provided us with the more alternative and diverse guitar bands of the last 10 years or so: Pavement, the Pixies, Nirvana, the Flaming Lips – the list goes on. We in the UK had the passing phenomenon that was ‘Brit Pop’, of course – but contrary to expectations, it didn’t ‘Live Forever’. And what do we have to show for it? The Albarn ego-mobile that is Blur? Glossy and grossing pub rockers Oasis? Spare me the details please – we’ve got zip to show for it, that’s what we’ve got. And now we have to suffer a fate far worse than Brit-Pop. We have cultivated with some skill, the persistent ulcer in our gut that is Coldplay and Starsailor
If this is rock n’ roll I’d be prepared to sleep with my own grandmother for kicks.
So it comes as a pleasant surprise to discover that British Sea Power are NOT our only hope. Those pesky, shambolic, bastard creations Garlic are.
Having long since advanced from their Paul Oakenfold endorsed infancy, the worryingly uneven Mike Wyzgowski and friends have crafted one of the most unlikely successes of 2003. It’s a little bit kooky, a little bit crazy and a little bit challenging on the old cranium – but good golly miss molly, it’s a beaut’.
Opening with the chirping, wry and acoustic ‘A Weird Wood Soul’, Garlic usher in an unusually alien dawn; gently picking guitar, swirling pianos and the frisky, shuffling rhythm of simple percussion provides the album with a pant-shittingly fine front entrance. The Grandaddy inflections on ‘Kathleen and Marie’ lift it ever so slightly with an electric, static charge of blues. Think Roxy Music’s Virginia Plain or Pjamarama and mix it up with a little Pavement and Frank Black. It’s pretty damn close.
With it’s alt-country flavourings and it’s pedantic attention to naught, ‘Jam Sabbatical’ packs and pops some breezy off-kilter pop nuggets, not least, ‘Never Let You Go’ and the zany but hugely satisfying if bizarre, ‘100 Miles’. ‘One Think Or Another’ may drag up the inevitable comparisons to Lou Reed and the Pixies – but it comes at exactly the right time in the album – at a point when you were considering swapping your entire record collection for just this one album.
Bloody marvellous. That’s all I’m going to say.