You’re at the bar, it’s a little crowded but nothing out of the ordinary. Welcoming, let’s say. Nobody looks overworked, there is a good vibe, it’s mellow. And yet, after what seems like (no, no, what HAS BEEN) a dire, thankless eternity of readjusting your gaze, top button, posture and wedge of crisp, visible, top-end cash notes in your most prominent hand, climbing onto the bar in one final act of lurid desperation, producing a weighty chunk of gold bullion as a bargaining tool, proficiently executing the splits, slicing your wrist open and bleeding liquid mercury into a spare half-pint glass, the bloke next to you still gets served first. You know? The Open know only too well how this feels. Their first record, 2004’s capable opus ‘The Silent Hours’, was like Echo & The Bunnymen running headlong into a wall, or The Verve in psychedelic zero-visibility led by the male Elizabeth Fraser. Qualities, coupled with hypnotic live performances, that should have had people agog. Yet it was largely passed by or forgotten, which was a truly disproportionate reaction. Crud even forgot to review the album, and we quite liked it. Could you just call it bad luck?
But their re-emergence with this, their boundless sophomore album, should reaffirm your faith in a lot of things, not least the romantic notion that hope really can triumph over adversity. And that not all record companies are faithless bastards. The fact that they’ve been allowed the necessary space to flourish into what they now call ‘Statues’ is really quite commendable. It’s a brave album, with space in a sprawling family tree of ambitious fringe rock music, but without immediate peer. And it leaves the first album in the shade – this is the one they were supposed to make. Where ‘The Silent Hours’ was soft, hard and then harder still in comfortable measure, this is practically a PhD in subtlety, the magnification thereof and the elegant, and sometimes damning, marriage of disparate elements.
Seven minute opener ‘Forever’ wallows initially in a stark melodic solitude, building the atmosphere with mournful, lonely freeform jazz interludes, synthesised strings and a pristine soft falsetto. It’s a choirboy’s solemn lament, trapped in a glass bubble. But it is joined in time by a caustic loop of sonic dissonance and an ever-imposing drum beat bearing down on the seclusion, ending up as Radiohead’s ‘There There’ battling against mother nature’s electrical fury in barren isolation. It is magnificent, and in a way doesn’t get topped for the rest of the album, not that they don’t have further cards to play. ‘We Can Never Say Goodbye’ and ‘Seasons of the Change’ are terrifically powerful indie anthems, like Doves with angels’ wings, driven to heights you wouldn’t imagine by Steven Bayley’s incredible lightening-rod vocals and toiling guitar. ‘My House’ is the biggest surprise though. Imagine Mars Volta engaging in martial arts with The Cure, with Cocteau Twins trying to calm the pair down. You need to hear it. Don’t let them slip through your fingers and into the night again.