I suppose Emily Eavis must be something of an old hippy at heart for personally inviting Nottingham’s ‘Swimming’ to perform at Glastonbury last year – not that the band’s debut album, ‘The Fireflow Trade’ is all deeply progressive dreamscapes and strung-out psychedelia – but much of it is. In fact, the whole mix sounds like it’s been squeezed through a wormhole into some future dimension on colonial Mars. And squeezed through no shortage of digital effects processors too. So cue up things that sound like they were sung or played backwards, layers of oscillation, words and images that would make Isaac Azimov look conservative and earfuls of thunderclap drumming. It’s intense; it makes your head spin and its surging, neo-Gothic passion fills the entire room with ether.
Mars Volta and Radiohead. Syd Barret’s Pink Floyd – it’s all in there, but for the noise it makes and all the ground it shakes it doesn’t quite hit the spot. Best of the bunch is new single, ‘Panthalass’ which combines searing New Romantics and screaming, unearthly goth. ‘Eagle Aviary’ on the otherhand, sounds like the last dying gasps of Crispian Mills and Kula Shaker.
Mediocrity. On an epic scale.