Not the most auspicious of starts – and certainly not the coolest. Loose collection of fiddle-packing blues and jazz misfits get invite from University lecturer to demonstrate recording trickery by taking a band into the studio and letting the rest of his students watch as they bang out a couple of the tunes they’ve been working on (but clearly not finished). Yes, there’s something faintly clinical about it, something fairly hokey, but when you learn that the producer they invite to surgery is none other than Eels and PJ Harvey, producer John Parish, you suspect that this might not be the predictable of autopsies. And you’d be right.
Reinforced with strings, some harmonica and some screaming slide-guitar, singers Chris Turpin and Stephanie Ward grapple with tonsil-tearing tunes as furious as bagful of bees and as big as a double-decker bus. It’s like a blast of air from a cattle-gun. When bands usually sing about a river bursting its banks, they don’t usually evoke the wild, kinetic fury of such an event. Fair enough, there wasn’t the sound of Gene Kelly splashing around in puddles when Mint Royale served us ‘Singin’ In The Rain’, but you get the gist. When the subject matter is big, so is the sound and when it’s tender – as it is on the gorgeous and petitioning, ‘Send Me An Angel Down’, the sound could quite feasibly have been torn from the ‘shattered hallelujahs’ of a Sunday hymn-sheet. It’s gospel meets Gomez, Anthony meets the Johnsons, rhythm meets the blues and as shamlessly smoky as a pubful of sixties beatniks. Sure it sounds a bit ingenuous arriving from the lungs of a couple of 21 year-old students from Bath and not some grizzled oldtimer from the Mississippi Delta, but when the dirty water tastes this sweet: who gives f*ck that it came out of a tap in Somerset?
The album was mixed and recorded by Ryan Hadlock (The Strokes, The Gossip) in Seattle, the same studio used by the Fleet Foxes to lay down their debut.
’Kill It Kid’ is out October 5th.
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