There is a moment, about 3 minutes into opening track ‘The Plight of Losing Out’, when Jon Clough’s laden and unsure voice triumphantly breaks out of its shell, taking the lead before an ascending musical drama. Then there is calm. It’s nice, readers. And there are repeat moments like this one, when his strong, yearning words are swept up by atmospheric surges, intensified gluts of power, melodies both tender and obscene, and everything just comes together. Thud. Like that. Into one cross-pollinated glory explosion, just for a moment. Check towards the end of the amazing dreamlike ‘Albert Ross’, 15 seconds (or alternatively 3 minutes) into the similarly lush ‘Junctions In Our Sleep’, from the bridge onwards in ‘The Cable and the Cars’, the list could and should go on.
It becomes apparent that this ain’t no damn singer’s vanity project, a hapless youthful accident or a directionless bout of projected self-promotion. It’s a true sum of its parts, with very special parts indeed. Jon’s vocals continually thump around an axis leading to Jarvis Cocker, Robert Smith, J Mascis, Black Francis and Jonathan Donahue, sounding so fantastically lead-heavy it’s like he’s hanging two bags of sugar from his tonsils at all times. Which is contrary to much of the musical backdrop, spread beneath him like a safety net, soft and floaty, firm but largely non-oppressive.
A lot of the record rings at roughly the same tone as Idlewild’s reflective benchmark ‘The Remote Part’. Not because it’s exactly the same (though the lonely acoustic ‘The Wrong Road’ does have a bit of ‘Live In A Hiding Place’ about it, for a bit anyway), but because they take the trouble of pillaging US indie’s cupboard bare, emptying the bag and jumping on their swag in steel-toed Doc Martins until it starts talking with convincing a British accent. With Idlewild it’s REM via The Smiths, with Medium 21 it’s Grandaddy, Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips, The Pixies, Beck, the Lemonheads and associates via Pulp. With The Cure probably interfering in some kind of inappropriate manner. Great British pop with all-American ingredients.