These things were sent to try us. It’s a British state of mind, our rainy disposition, expecting bottlenecks and broken bones every time we step out the door, outwardly denouncing achievements unless they were obtained over some insurmountable odds. If it is a requirement that we must earn our triumphs then Hope Of The States are, it would seem, rightful victors of their own little coup.
But we don’t want to judge this album based solely on its external circumstances, it was but a hair’s breadth away from completion when Jimmi Lawrence tragically took his own life in January – his majestic guitar work still sashays across the entire album, prominent and preserved. But while it might be easy to read false reasoning into anything using hindsight, this really does sound like a band that for its shortfalls could cope if it had to, built as it is on dense foundations, with a telescope in the attic trained on faraway possibilities.
There were other storms to be weathered though, the speed with which they rose (or were raised) to prominence for one could have been their undoing. It’s now barely a year since their self-released, highly-collectable debut EP ‘Black Dollar Bills’ made waves and by the end of a whirlwind promotional tour last October, already teetering under the weight of major label expectations, they did look prematurely spent. Yet here stands a first complete work radiating with achievement, conscience and craft. It’s not revolutionary, though its imagery may insist it is, but it does matter.
The key factor is that it’s neither a post-rock album teasing the mainstream, nor mainstream with post-rock aspirations, rather that it celebrates convention with one hand whilst grasping for higher rungs with the other. If anything they’re students of the genre, rather than bona fide members. They’re not as exhaustive as Godspeed, nor as abstract as A Silver Mt Zion, or as extreme as Mogwai, though they do exhibit token aspects of them all. Opening instrumental, the engaging and harsh ‘Black Amnesias’ has the mark of the latter all over it, only with a lighter texture. And thanks to producer Ken Thomas’ guiding hands the album does feel like Sigur Ros even if it doesn’t exactly sound like it.
They have closer peers in the cinematic indie of The Delgados (especially ‘1776’), the jagged melancholy of Radiohead (see most of Jimmi’s guitar work) and the classic piano-led rationality of Coldplay (‘Don’t Go To Pieces’ amongst others). And like those bands it’s not really about great motions of discovery, more where they’re pushing what’s already there. There are times when Sam Herlihy’s uncomfortable vocals almost tip the scales away from the rich depths being mined instrumentally behind him, but there’s little denying how intrinsically tangled up in the drama they are, rather than superimposed on top (something with which Ben Cooper Temple Clause is well familiar).
In a way, being so consistent throughout, the album almost seems too comfortable with itself. But arguments and analysis will never be as effective as just listening to ‘Black Dollar Bills’ build, balance and combust at 4 minutes and 40 seconds, to be dragged back from the brink by the uplifting ‘George Washington’ in the best pairing of the record. Or the moment ‘Goodhorsehymn’ spectacularly blossoms out of forlorn rumbling into airborne hopefullness. Far too accomplished to be marked as a disappointment, yet not quite definite enough to be an all time classic, it could still find itself sat alongside the likes of ‘Ok Computer’, ‘Urban Hymns’ and ‘Parachutes’ as a mainstream album that did things that little bit differently.