The ninth month of the year two thousand and three AD must clearly be remembered as the best, most monumental and indeed important 30 days for British rock since the sun began its first creeping cycle between doom-laden clouds over a freshly erected Stonehenge back in the day. Muse finally release an album that makes perfect sense of its own ridiculousness, The Cooper Temple Clause release a sophomore effort that actually stands up unaided (look, no hands!), and Oceansize penetrate the atmosphere and leave a bastard-huge crater on the surface just to let you know that they and their debut album have arrived. And thank you very much. This truly is something quite spectacular. And moving, even for all its cold-shouldered heaviness and introverted frustration. Though the results are so consistently studied and controlled you doubt the sincerity of that, but accept it as part of the plan.
This is focused and efficient pummelling with as much in common with Mansun at their most thick and indulgent and The Deftones at their most fraught. Even though the electronics aren’t at all overbearing there’s a mechanical sense to everything on offer, like they’ve been programmed, set to crunch and then let go in a crowded area with potential headline-creating consequences. ‘One Day All This Could Be Yours’ and its ‘Mezzanine’ atmosphere arranged in the ‘Any Day Now’ formation is just the warm-up and ‘Catalyst’ before it one last loose live wire being soldered down. By the time they’re at the epic ‘Massive Bereavement’ with beats cascading across your headphones they’re like the Mars Volta slowed down to 33 rpm and quite a formidable force at that.
It’s only now that we realise there’s a gaping bloody hole in the middle of Mansun’s ‘Six’. Its centrepiece appears to be here in the shape of the incredible accelerating-through-an-asteroid-belt magnificence of ‘Amputee’ anyway. And that peak track, along with the excellently titled and superbly entwined ‘Women Who Love Men Who Love Drugs’, really hone down the appeal. It’s an album of great excess, 4 of the 12 tracks exceed 8 minutes, yet it’s often like they’re just teasing you. It’s an album of great magnitude, but it’s all built from the ground up with the most delicate of materials. It’s an album that lulls you into a sense of observational calm but sends you away bruised. It’s an album of great contradiction and even greater achievement. And it is almost certainly the debut album of the year.
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