We’re living through interesting times right now, or sometimes we are. The past 10 years have been a colourful era for UK indie music, for music with character, made by characters. From the masked psychosis of Clinic, through Super Furry Animals’ adventurous skirmishes, the Beta Band’s Mormon psychedelia, 80s Matchbox’s early distorted eccentricities, British Sea Power’s uniformed, textured vim, Mystery Jets’ bric-a-brac prog blend to The Horrors’ noisy theatricality. Bands linked not in an immediate or apparent sense, but by their fertile imaginations and the 3D nature of their existence. Bands that create their own space to exist in. And now you can add another name to that loose list, if you’ve got enough in the way if spare lettering. The intriguingly/pretentiously titled The Strange Death Of Liberal England are not revolutionaries as their tag might suggest, these songs feel more observatory than proactive, though they do revel in discontent and the resulting drama.
Their live shows are a stylised and abrasive brew, members of the intellectually attired band pacing the stage in-between songs with signs thrust above themselves reading “REPENT! REPENT!” or “GOOD OLD FASHIONED WAR” and the like, as they chime up ringing melodic roughage and a rattled chorus. This actually does translate surprisingly well onto record, in spite of the absent visuals. The underlying suggestion is sufficient. As ‘Modern Folk Song’ kicks in out of a faint waltz with magnificent bluster, seams splintering, excess distortion spilling over the lip, every aspect heaving, tendons taut, with the same bloody minded determination, you know this is a band headed somewhere. Even if this mini album ultimately lacks a concluding chapter, a conclusive reason for the crackling hostility and restless hollers, the journey is fascinating enough to exist without one. How this bodes for further down the line we don’t know, but for now it’s thrilling.
They are part post-rock, it’s something for which they’ve got a name, but it’s only on ‘Summer Gave Us Sweets But Autumn Wrought Division’ complete with excessive wordage in the title, that they totally pay heed to this, sweeping through sonic landscapes in three acts with much e-bow reverb, making peers of iLiKETRAiNS and Redjetson. Elsewhere the same dynamics are used to spiral towards crescendos, but there’s a much more traditional structure overall. They’re a proper musical rabble, defined by number and common cause; like Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds at their baddest on distraught sea-shanty ‘An Old Fashioned War’ and inevitably the Arcade Fire on the wounded mass town crier chorus of ‘I Saw Evil’ and the brilliantly unrelenting ‘Oh Solitude’. Craggy singer Adam Woolway sounds like Yan from British Sea Power strangling Neil Young, which could be an irritant for some, yet amid the fiery, dramatic apocalypse they conjure up it feels so very appropriate. This isn’t necessarily supposed to be a comfortable listen, it is supposed to make an impression. Which it duly does. You’ll be picking figurative ash and shrapnel from your ear canals for days after your first encounter.