There are but four of The Earlies, and conventionally so, but there is the feeling that they amount to much more than that. The reality is that this debut album of multi-faceted croaky psychedelic pop was indeed crafted by many hands – a flute here, an oboe just there – weighing in with as many as 11 bodies live, but that’s not quite what we mean, although it does give the record a convincing vastness. The band were founded largely, and quite unconventionally so, over email communication fired between bedrooms in Lancashire and Texas. And this record sounds like exactly that – an electronic blip travelling weightlessly across expanding, dreamy territories.
Of course they’ve creatively consummated the relationship in person now, but listening through to the album in its entirety on headphones is like having aspects mailed in from afar, their sources removed from each other, products of separate minds, but very much walking the same line. It’s like you’re sensing rather than hearing. Any record which endeavours to deal in both psychedelia and pop is usually inevitably linked to the Flaming Lips, but from the off Grandaddy seem a more obvious reference point, explaining away the bubbling electronic squiggles and squeaks, mournful but dainty piano and Neil-Young-chasing-rainbows sweetness of the vocals.
Their net does fall much wider in the end though. As could have been expected from such a gathering under this particular umbrella, ‘Wayward Song’ gives a nod to the Polyphonic Spree. ‘Slow Man’s Dream’ and ‘25 Easy Pieces’ placed back-to-back form parts of a puzzle that combine to create a near-scale replica of Spiritualized’s ‘Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space’. ‘The Devil’s Country’ is a warped-out jazzy tête-à-tête between J Spaceman’s lot and ‘Screamadelica’ period Primal Scream. And the brilliant, fizzy ‘Morning Wonder’ could be The Chemical Brothers in ‘Private Psychedelic Reel’ mode, trapped in a sunset moment. It radiates love.
But as much as you can refer to this as a psychedelic pop record, you can equally as a chill-out collection. Its constant lifeblood is a cotton-fresh Lemon Jelly or Royksopp-esque attitude to landscaping, but crucially that isn’t relied on alone. It might not surpass any of its easily sourced influences, but it doesn’t sound exactly like any of them either. And that is the real joy of this record.