BLUR: Blur

(#565: 22 February 1997, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Beetlebum/Song 2/Country Sad Ballad Man/M.O.R./On Your Own/Theme From Retro/You're So Great/Death Of A Party/Chinese Bombs/I'm Just A Killer For Your Love/Look Inside America/Strange News From Another Star/Movin' On/Essex Dogs (incorporating Interlude)

 

I was maybe too close to things - or possibly too far away from things - at the time really to appreciate how violent and vituperative a gesture the fifth Blur album represented. Its cover was a stock image of a patient being rushed into Accident and Emergency - that's me just over one month ago, then - which was supposed to represent "an anaesthetic dream." Or perhaps the anaesthetic block had begun to wear off.

Blur, the album - or, like blackstar, it may well be that its, or the band's, name doesn't need to be capitalised - still sounds like the virulent aesthetic opposite of everything its makers had hitherto been erroneously assumed to have stood for. It is scarcely a surprise that Blur should pursue that latter path; no doubt after The Great Escape they could have gone further in the direction of Theatreland, with a cast of thousands, high-kicking dance troupes, the London Symphony Orchestra and a twelve-ring circus, but (as Keith Tippett also did after turning from the enormous caravan of Centipede to the minute explorations of Ovary Lodge) the group opted to re-evaluate themselves as a group; all the music on Blur, the album, is performed by them, with no horn or string sections and no guest narrators, and largely played live in the studio (mostly at London's Mayfair Studios, although the vocal tracks for four of the songs were recorded at the Grettisgat studio in Reykjavik, the nearest faraway place).

 

The band considered staying and evolving together infinitely more important than ensuring they remained part of the dwindling Britpop circus. Britpop was, by early 1997, largely burned out, bisected by the twin forks of Girl Power and dance music. Its headlines were spent, and Blur in particular had been severely bruised by the "war" with Oasis, in which they were identified as middle-class fakers as opposed to the honest, working-class Gallaghers; identified, ironically, by a rapacious British media largely run by people who went to public school and Oxbridge. Morning Glory was The Voice Of The People, The Great Escape a Mister La-dee-Dah Gunner Graham sneer at them.

This helped to intensify the band's own generally wretched state. Damon Albarn was hooked on heroin, Graham Coxon on alcohol. Coxon in particular was feeling increasingly alienated from the rest of Blur and was possibly on the verge of quitting. Anxious to save the band, Albarn assured him that he would be given considerably more input than on their previous two albums (where his role had essentially been that of licensed wayward lead guitarist). Furthermore, the showbusiness exhibitionism was to be dropped. Only Blur appear on blur. There are no guest speakers, no horn or string sections, and no wry character studies. This was where Damon was going to come out from behind the masks of Tracy Jacks and Ernold Same, and write and sing about himself, his own life, his personal state of being.

Coxon took that assurance as a challenge. Already a keen fan of American indie music, particularly the group Pavement, he determined to channel its influence into the structures and shadows of the album's songs. This is especially evident on the record's lead track (and lead single), "Beetlebum," where his playing suggests intimate familiarity with Pavement's work on the equally raw, spontaneous and unplanned Wowee Zowee.

The song is introduced by a rhythmic chop from Coxon’s lead guitar, as though desperately trying to restart a demolished Ford Cortina, following which its melody gradually unfolds and lead vocal, bass and drums are added one by one. Comparisons were inevitably made with White Album Beatles, especially “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” (“She’s a gun, now what you done?”) but Albarn’s distressed slouch of a vocal, coupled with the general bleariness of the backing track, also suggests one of Robert Wyatt’s anti-signifier pop songs from the Matching Mole era.

 

A drug song by any measurable standard of metaphor – “Just get numb, now what you done?” – it nevertheless bursts into reluctant light when Albarn’s echoplexed “And when she lets me slip away” provokes the group to harmonise and swing (albeit very slowly) to reveal the elusive umbilical cord to all that we had previously recognised as Blur, over which Albarn pours acidic baths of sweetness (“She turns me on and all my violence gone”), before the regretful minor coda of the bridge descends back into the trudge of the verse-cum-chorus.

 

The premature summer shadows fall back into purple-grey nocturnes of ascending confusion as Coxon’s massed atonal guitar choirs and random “I Am The Walrus” radio tunings drown the final refrain of “He’s on, he’s on, he’s on it” (which sounds slightly like “Piss off, piss off, he’s alright” if you turn the volume up really loudly) before the song, now engulfed, abruptly cuts off with the pressing of the stop button on the cassette recorder and a final vocal grunt which sounds not a million miles away from the word “shit.” Which of course “Beetlebum” isn’t. Far from it.

The worry was that the band's record label would listen to the album, complain about the absence of singles and refuse to release it. It was a benign worry for the band themselves, who went on to compose and record what they believed was their most extreme musical statement to date, 121 seconds of post-Nevermind tick-tock-quiet/ICBM-LOUD punk rock with deliberately "stoopid" (as opposed to "stupid") lyrics.

 

But "Song 2" turned out to be the biggest song of Blur's career; the Parlophone executives loved it and it finally got them noticed in America. It seems a merry and deliberate stamping on any cor-blimey vaudeville tracings...and what a great band performance, too, with doubled-up drums and Alex James' bass going into sinister unison with Coxon's guitars after the first chorus, and Albarn's vocal cheerily not giving a sprig about pleasing the parents. It is truly the best single of 1964 that could only have been released in 1997.

It is only after a couple of listens that you realise that "Country Sad Ballad Man"'s subject matter is identical to that of "Country House" and one could satisfactory call it Coxon's revenge on that alleged Moment of National Unity. The song stumbles blearily but purposively towards its sardonically shattering payoff of "I'm done and I'm fucked," and again the Pavement influence shimmers into audibility; indeed, something like “Sensitive Euro Man," recorded by Malkmus and company in 1994, is practically a blueprint for this post-Britpop Blur with its drooping guitars, semi-shambling beats, use of space and general air of knowing melancholy.

 

"M.O.R." plays with the chords of "Boys Keep Swinging," with a smattering of references to "Fantastic Voyage" - Bowie and Eno got co-composer credits - and is a gleeful and noisy subversion of Blur's recent past ("Here comes a low") with a particularly thrilling climax where the band seemingly hammer their "legacy" into shards with noisily-liberated guitar and piano (and that high-speed staccato piano you hear at the song's beginning predicates LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends" by two decades). Try singing along to this, they seem to be suggesting.

Actually, that description is seriously underselling things. "M.O.R." sees Blur merrily stamp upon and stamp out everything you ever imagined to be "Blur," as does "On Your Own," a drugged-up account of a forlorn rave pilgrimage to Goa which sounds like "Country House" scrunched and pushed through a rusty mangle, complete with Roland TR-606 Drumatix programming and noise guitar from Coxon which really does not sound like anything readily attributable - not even Arto Lindsay or Sonny Sharrock. Britpop being smothered with grey-tipped graffiti. Nevertheless, one should note how firmly Albarn's increasingly distended and irreverent vocal is pointing the way towards Gorillaz, his unexpected second act.

"Theme From Retro" is a largely instrumental - save occasional vocal samples ("the horror!") - organ-driven elegy somewhere between 1968 Pink Floyd (more Saucerful than Piper, I'd say) and 1979 Wire, which leads to "You're So Great," essentially Graham Coxon on his scratchy and ironically jolly own, akin to Guided By Voices threaded back to the Cavern Club. Due acknowledgement should be paid to stalwart producer Stephen Street - yes, these songs may sound like demos at a distance, but the mixing is artful and cleverly avoids any Achtung Baby muddiness.

There are clear precedents in Blur's back catalogue for "Death Of A Party" - in particular "He Thought Of Cars" - but the exhausted sadness of this, the album's highlight (or lowlight), is not really precedented. The ice rink organ implies a continued Jerry Dammers influence but the song's spaces are so empty and metallic that one imagines the Britpop circus tent to have been entirely dismantled and stripped. The song was actually written in 1992 but was radically reworked for this album. In it, Albarn, as sad and tired as he has ever been heard, sings of the metaphorical party being over, with people dying of Aids through unprotected sex. "Go to another party and hang myself - gently on the shelf," he sings, but that get-out clause fools nobody. It is as though he has stared directly at the essence of Britpop and seen nothing but a hollow, vacated shelf. Musically this sounds nothing like your average eager-to-please-xFm indie wannabes. Flags are at half-mast rather than being waved. This song marks the death knell for something we aren't quite sure ever truly lived. All the people - so few people now left.

Momentary relief comes from the quick (84-second) punk blast of "Chinese Bombs," a Bruce Lee tribute which isn't quite Ash's "Kung Fu" (though doesn't aspire to be as such). But "I'm Just A Killer For Your Love," complete with what sounds like Coxon trampling with guitar through a clogged-up swamp, is detuned glam-rock which may be masking a swipe at Suede.

Possibly the album's most illuminatory moment, however, may be "Look Inside America," in which Albarn finally overcomes his previous prejudices and learns that the nation, flaws and all, can and must be embraced, or at least guardingly accepted (despite his repeated "she's alright"s, the singer remains fundamentally cynical about the place). There's a charming synthesised string section which doubtless left Parlophone anticipating a real one. Not this time around; we'll manage by ourselves, thanks.

But blur then turns more despondent, in ways which had hitherto eluded the band. "Strange News From Another Star" takes its name from the titular short story of Hermann Hesse's 1919 octet collection. That story concerns itself with someone living in the actual world, as you and I would recognise it, and dreaming of a second, idealised world, much like our own but with all the mistakes ironed out. Which is real, which is fantasy etc. Albarn's ideal as expressed in the song, however, would appear to be oblivion - "All I want to be/Is washed out by the sea" - while the song's music wanders between Thomas Dolby's "Airwaves" and Nirvana's "Something In The Way" before settling on a sad early Bowie chorus. "Give me all your stuff/Until I can't get up" could be a heroin reference or equally that anonymous A&E patient on the cover, begging the anaesthetists for final relief and deliverance. Finally there is some rueful reflection on Albarn's own work: "All I've ever done is tame/Will you love me all the same?/Will you love me though it's always the same?" There follows a "Space Oddity" orbital lift-off and the rhythm section enters, active but purposely muffled, as though they are not quite within our grasp.

Coxon's guitar car can't rev itself out of the ditch as that song segues into "Movin' On," an intentionally garish and parodic distortion of everything Blur were perceived to be about. Albarn seems to be gleefully trampling the song into the mud with his hugely sarcastic and occasionally scary vocal - yes, we're supposed to be moving on from all of this, but The Man won't let us, as evinced by Coxon getting stuck in a reverse loop at song's end.

At the beginning of the final track, the guitarist endeavours to get (re)started, but to no avail; his tyres have probably been punctured. There follows a harsh, dark chamber of hellish catacombs down which Albarn - now narrating or reciting rather than singing, much, as I now realise (having just listened to Saint Etienne's The Night) Sarah Cracknell is in the habit of doing - describes the hospital nightmare reality behind the ruddy front of laddism, oi-oi, up for it; it is a landscape of murder, graffiti, puke and piss (why do I think of the Special A.K.A.'s "The Boiler"?), drunken squaddies and, crucially, stilettos; this could be Colchester in the seventies then as vividly as the nineties now. The music, as such, grinds joylessly with a whining dentist's drill of a car siren, newly stripped of driver, boring into one's head more or less all of the time. Strip the airs of ironic modernity from the "popscene" and you are left with the familiar picture from a generation before.

 

There is neither hope nor exit in this music. "This Is A Low" at least suggested a horizon, an escape route. "Yuko And Hiro" saw two lovers divided by economic happenstance. But "Essex Dogs" focuses on the mind, which never left home, being methodically dissected and dissolved. It is another superb band performance - you can tell that all four musicians are working exceptionally avidly to render the piece effective - but ultimately the piece can only but render itself into shards, or composites of The Shard. After an interval we hear the ironically-titled "Interlude," another loop of can't-get-started-or-finished guitar and electronica (Stephen Street used some then-new technology which enabled him to loop and restructure elements of the band's jam sessions - and yes, unlike the We Must Write A Hit laboratory techniques previously applied to their songs, Blur came in and played together as a foursome, jamming until something became apparent) and I am reminded of the sounds and minute shuffles that the patient is apt to witness in Dignitas (see Ute Lemper and Scott Walker's "Lullaby (By-by-by)" for further exploration of the latter).

 

And yet, even if the record had been designed to kill off "Britpop," blur does bear clear signs of hope. The fly-by-night "fans" were free to flee; the album only went single platinum, as opposed to The Great Escape's triple platinum and Parklife's quadruple platinum - but it was the survival of Blur, the band, that was the record's real priority, to dig themselves a tunnel out of gaudy Britannia Rules Again hell (the stylistic similarity of some of "Beetlebum" to the work of The Auteurs did not pass unnoticed). For Damon Albarn it was an opportunity to lay some of the groundwork for Gorillaz, while for Graham Coxon the record was an ultimate vindication of his demands to be noticed and acted upon. For Blur it perhaps provided proof of who the real visionaries of Britpop turned out to be. Me? I came to in the recovery room and was more than happy to munch on a tuna-and-mayo sandwich, having been brought back to life, and all that.

TEXAS: White On Blonde

 

 

(#564: 15 February 1997, 1 week; 23 August 1997, 1 week)

 

Track listing: "0:34"/Say What You Want/Drawing Crazy Patterns/Halo/Put Your Arms Around Me/Insane/Black Eyed Boy/Polo Mint City/White On Blonde/Postcard/"0:28"/Ticket To Lie/Good Advice/Breathless

One way of beginning this piece would be to revisit the notion of music from Glasgow and its two parallel paths to America. As I've discussed before, Glaswegian musicians from the eighties onward seem either to want the lush, sophisticated mainstream American sound, or the scratchy backwoods - Philadelphia International, or the Velvet Underground.

In the latter field, Glasgow seemed to be starting to make a substantial impact as 1996 moved into its successor, in particular the group of artists centred around the Chemical Underground record label. That group included Belle and Sebastian, Mogwai, Arab Strap and The Delgados, all of whom looked to be doing something unprecedented with the basic rock group model - even though Mogwai and Arab Strap come from Hamilton and Falkirk respectively, they still made the best sense in Glasgow.

On a tangent to this movement were Bellshill's Teenage Fanclub, then already easing into veteran status with 1997's excellent Songs From Northern Britain. So, from that perspective, it was all happening. But where did that leave the more upmarket Glasgow musicians who continued to crave a lush, mainstream nowness?

Although it would be tempting to talk of Texas, the group, in the same terms as Deacon Blue or Wet Wet Wet, that would be rather misleading. They never really pursued that clipped path, nor did they appear to have much to do with anyone's notion of America - bassist and co-songwriter Johnny McElhone, formerly of Altered Images and Hipsway, was inspired to name the band after the film Paris, Texas. If anything, the partnership which McElhone initially formed with singer Sharleen Spiteri - also technically from Bellshill, although she grew up in Balloch, by the shores of Loch Lomond - puts me in mind of The Smiths. Texas was their child and other band members were employed as a necessity; even that sounds quite harsh, given how integral, for instance, guitarist Ally McErlaine has been to the band's sound over the years. As a group, they have functioned together quite perfectly.

In 1994, however, Texas were not in a good place. Despite their initial 1989 success with the Southside album and its lead single "I Don't Want A Lover," they had subsequently struggled. Subsequent albums Mothers Heaven (1991) and Ricks Road (1993), though good, seemed too dour and withdrawn in an era of kandy-kolored rave and nascent up-for-it Britpop. Had it not been for a degree of continued success in mainland Europe it is likely that they would have been dropped by their record label back then.

Hence the three-year rethink and reboot, which saw the band come up with a large number of songs, far more than the fourteen finally selected for their fourth album. Their lucky break came when Spiteri was invited, at the last minute, to appear on Chris Evans' Channel 4 television show TFI Friday, where she performed a bit of Al Green's "Tired Of Being Alone" (a non-album single for Texas which briefly, if predictably, restored them to the top twenty in 1992), and observers were somewhat taken aback by how good a singer she actually was.

Evans duly and heavily plugged the lead single from the band's forthcoming album, "Say What You Want" on both radio and television, and listeners were moderately startled by how up to late-nineties date it, and they, sounded - which is to say that it sounded as though they had finally opened the curtains and windows and permitted modernity to enter the room. While the record remained redolent, to some extent, of "Tired Of Being Alone" - and, to a greater extent, "Sexual Healing" by Marvin Gaye and "Love, Thy Will Be Done" by Martika - it seemed in perfect keeping with what British pop fans seemed to want, and brought the band who made it dramatically back into the foreground.

There was to be no compromise with White On Blonde. The band felt confident enough to produce the record themselves - though, as I will mention later on, were happy to bring outside producers on board on the rare occasions they were needed - and Spiteri in particular was intent that the record sound as contemporary as possible. No doubt she was influenced on this front by her then-partner Ashley Heath, at the time Associate Editor of THE FACE, who I'm sure gently prompted her towards what was then going on musically. She was not interested in Texas being a working museum of the worthy.

The consequence of all of this thinking was that White On Blonde sounds commendably modern, even if its modernist sheen sometimes conceals a slightly traditionalist outlook. Songs like "Drawing Crazy Patterns" and "Halo" offer vocal stylings which sound as though they're sharing a flat with Chrissie Hynde - although, much as happened with The Pretenders through tragic circumstance, you could view the Texas of 1997 as having reduced to the bare bones of a frontwoman, one other musician and anybody else she could find to understand her.

And the sound of White On Blonde is quite striking in its absence of comfort and reaasurance. The record commences with a brief ambient soundscape - police sirens, Evening Times vendors; oh, this must be Glasgow - which is almost immediately subverted by a sampled string orchestra performing Cole Porter's "I Love Paris."

This then segues into "Say What You Want" - it was a smart idea to frontload the record with its most familiar song - but the song itself is hardly cosy or comforting. Indeed it seems to be much more of an extended fuck-you sermon to somebody who clearly doesn't give a shit what Spiteri wants and more or less sneers at her dreams. Fine, the singer says, but your crap is just going to push me forward, not hold me back, as you so clearly desire. How many of the song's many fans twigged what it was really about...

...or even whom it might be about, since White On Blonde functions as a partial concept album about a failing relationship, if not with a partner as such then maybe with the record label? The record itself implies rather than clarifies such a scenario, since Spiteri's observations are more often than not oblique. There is the profoundly unhappy protagonist of "Drawing Crazy Patterns" who has married too young and is already seeking escape, perhaps violently. But who is the subject of "Halo" - Diana? Thatcher? Spiteri herself? Not that it matters much musically; visiting producer Mike Hedges makes the song sound good - if Spiteri can't haul herself too far from Hynde vocally, Hedges brings that Manic Street Preachers - and Associates - rusted sparkle, as well as the entirely unanticipated mid-song outbreak of squally guitar and Tackhead-y breakbeats, to proceedings.

More disturbing still is "Put Your Arms Around Me," the album's big ballad, for which Texas called on the services of Dave Stewart. If Spiteri moves much closer vocally to Maria McKee on this song - and it is inconceivable that the band would not have been thoroughly familiar with McKee's 1996 album Life Is Sweet, one of the decade's very finest pop records - it sounds much more like "Show Me Hell" than "Heaven." The song sounds as though being played in a mirage, with nightmare effects whirling around Spiteri's increasingly desperate vocal ("Are you ready to let yourself drown?"), clinging on to a chimera of love rather than the thing itself ("You let me believe that you are someone else"). The corridors of shriek pile up until the plug is abruptly pulled from the song, as though the dream, or life itself, had ended.

The record's intensity does not let up; "Insane," also done with Hedges, bears some modish trip-hop touches, including a mournful trombone, real or synthesised, but is generally a grim and unforgiving lament ("No one believes in you...I understand") which grinds its teeth into your neck like a vengeful vampire. Marti Pellow and Ricky Ross did not harbour such ambitions - although Arab Strap certainly did (see "Girls of Summer" from 1999's live Mad For Sadness, the recording of a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in Lambeth which I attended, for confirmation).

"Black Eyed Boy" goes for a sixties Northern Soul mood but sounds a little overcooked, which may well have been the intention; it also shows a mastery of silence and pauses worthy of Ultravox. It isn't a simple Vandellas stomper (although Martha and the Vandellas' work was anything but simple); over it, Spiteri is essentially essaying a concerned variant on the fuck-you template.

There follows a brief but exceedingly strange breeze of what used to be called "illbient"; "Polo Mint City" seems to be an especially woozy variant on "Wild Thing," possibly threaded through Blur's "He Thought Of Cars," and initially sounds actually quite disturbing. However, since I grew up in Uddingston and Bothwell, I know that Polo Mint City is the local slang name for East Kilbride - so called because the town is surrounded by many, many roundabouts - so I wonder whether this is the band having a wee laugh at the Jesus and Mary Chain.

That interlude leads into the relatively conventional title track, one of those portraits of a lady of her time who has not aged too well (perhaps Spiteri was thinking of how she herself might end up if she weren't too careful). In turn this takes us, unexpectedly, towards the sleazily-garbled rocker "Postcard" which appears to be a send-up of Oasis (Spiteri does a great Liam Gallagher, albeit from a get-me-the-fuck-out-of-Muirhead perspective). The ghost of "Polo Mint City" then performs a fleeting orbital lap of honour, like a recurring dream that cautious consciousness cannot quite shake off.

"Ticket To Lie," though musically the album's most straightforward song, is a nihilistic and threatening précis of a profoundly disturbed mind (its opening line is "Attention annoys me"). It is as if Spiteri is addressing the listener - look, you came here, do you like what you hear, tell me what bullshit you desire and I'll manufacture it for you, oh and I'm not sure that I care that much...

(abrupt fast forward to the Charli xcx of "360" - "I don't fucking care what you think"...!)

Spiteri's expressed essence of insecurity - which has also turned out to be Charli xcx's hallmark - continues to wander through the elegantly-writhing Greek Thomson cloisters of "Good Advice," written and produced with the excellent Rae & Christian and utilising a sample of John Cameron's library music piece "Half Forgotten Daydreams"; "I need some good advice, some good advice, to wear my crown."

The album concludes with "Breathless." Ostensibly a hands-in-the-air end-of-the-show singalong ballad - Lord forbid one should term it an "anthem" - attentive listening reveals the song to be a fairly brutal examination of domestic abuse; the other side of the scenario coin traced by The Blue Nile in 1996's "Family Life" and perhaps revealing the record's real and bloodied subtext.

Whose is that male voice which materialises towards the end of the possibly literally-entitled "Breathless"? The album's credits show it to belong to one Steven Granville, although the harmonica solo in the same song is uncredited (given the fact, however, that three of White On Blonde's songs were co-written with Robert Hodgens, a.k.a. Bobby Bluebell, I wonder whether Ken McCluskey might have played it).

And although Mr Granville sounds like nobody's ghost - an understudy for Marti Pellow, perhaps, but definitely nobody's ghost - he does instinctively put me in mind of another voice (and the presence of Hedges here cannot be coincidental), a voice who could have sung "Put Your Arms Around Me" so easily and beautifully, a voice belonging to the person about whom several of these songs might just, if only marginally, have been concerned.

A person who, not yet forty, had elected to take his own life on 22 January 1997, ten days before White On Blonde was released. While Belle and Sebastian had initially been instigated as a university project, under the tutelage of Alan Rankine, Billy Mackenzie - the great not-wholly-told story of Scottish pop music - had fluttered, flustered and faded. At the time, Texas' record felt as much to me as an unwitting requiem as well as a defiant comeback. Maybe Billy could have done with a lot more of that properly-channelled defiance. But White On Blonde suggested with such subtly persuasive force that some stories' endings had to be defied. Texas' story will continue here.

REEF: Glow

 

(#563: 8 February 1997, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Place Your Hands/I Would Have Left You/Summer’s In Bloom/Lately Stomping/Consideration/Don’t You Like It?/Come Back Brighter/Higher Vibration/I’m Not Scared/Robot Riff/Yer Old/Lullaby

 

I wonder if Glow might now be viewed as a nineties classic if Primal Scream had recorded it. As things happened, Primal Scream (with Andrew Weatherall) were racing towards other places at the time and re-emerged later in 1997 with the compelling Vanishing Point.

 

Glastonbury band Reef named themselves as such because they found it was an anagram of Free (the group). All back to 1973, then, or so it was thought, thanks to the era’s vocal espousers of laddism and in great part to a novelty tag on a Chris Evans television programme.

 

Many felt that the surge of Britpop reopened the drawbridge to the pitchfork-wielding vanguard of know-our-place conservatism (John Major was still Prime Minister at this point), weakly masked by alleged irony. But I don’t think there’s anything remotely ironic about Reef; they want to rock and generally scream about doing so.

 

Glow was Reef’s second album and opens with their most famous (and perhaps most misleading) song. “Place Your Hands” is the one everyone remembers, with Gary Stringer’s unquestionably individualistic vocal stylings. A bit like Ocean Colour Scene’s Simon Fowler having recently and accidentally placed his left thumb in a hot toaster, some cynics might crow, or Ozzy Osbourne receiving an unexpected tax bill.

 

“Place Your Hands” is absolutely and unapologetically traditional, as though 1975 hadn’t really happened, and irritatingly it’s as catchy as fuck. I can picture fifteen-year-old mid-nineties lads busy waving their fists and shrivelling up their already narrow shoulders. Oh, and Mr Stringer is singing “Place your hands on my hope,” not whatever fifteen-year-old you thought he might have been singing.

 

But the song doesn’t really usher us towards a drizzly motorcade of trad rock. Stringer’s artful mangling of Jagger and Plant on “I Would Have Left You” is knowingly retro, “weird” instrumental middle section included. I’m not saying I would ever willingly listen to it again, but it’s cleverer than you might have thought. The band are clearly striving for Black Crowes authority – down to hiring George Drakoulias as producer – and their artistic range is focused (if slightly narrowly so).

 

“Summer’s In Bloom” is ostensibly ridiculous, with Stringer evidently having fun rolling all those “r”s, but I can’t bring myself to dislike it; there’s a spirit at work here. On big ballads like “Consideration” – probably Glow’s best song – he touches James Dean Bradfield territory. “Come Back Brighter” is really rather catchy with its bouncy electro undertow and subtle guitar dissonances which bring, in that order, Denim and Elastica’s “Car Song” to mind.

 

By the time we reach “I’m Not Scared” – I prefer the Eighth Wonder/Pet Shop Boys and Ladytron ones myself, but anyway… - one realises that, yes, Stringer’s voice can be wallpaper razor annoying and the musical moves relatively traditional. But for the fifteen-year-olds who didn’t necessarily know about the older stuff – especially in what were still, to all intents and purposes, pre-internet days – but who felt frustrated about I don’t know what, all they heard was this huge, confident rocking sound and an angry guy yelling at them, and that turned out to be precisely what they wanted.

 

“Robot Riff” is an extended jam – not that far removed from Neu! or even Stereolab, with its circular bassline – which sees the band tentatively venturing into freeform territory (full credit due to guitarist Kenwyn House). Meanwhile, “Yer Old” is Reef’s perfect fuck-you riposte to ageing people like me who would pick holes in their valour. I note that in places, Stringer sounds remarkably like James Murphy of/a.k.a. LCD Soundsystem, and the song could act as a pre-emptive answer to “Losing My Edge” (i.e. “we’re more relevant to the kids than all the ageing fuckers you know”).

 

Overall, while Glow is not my particular cup of musical Roobios, it would be an imperfect launching pad for a diatribe against laddism and Britishness. They rock and people of our age will almost certainly find them intolerable. That is perhaps their chief point. If this was your first chance to hear guitar rock of any kind, then you weren’t going to be worried about whether it lived up to the good old days of A Nod’s As Good As A Wink… or Fire And Water. You were young and pissed off, and Gary Stringer sounded exactly as pissed off as you. Reef have continued, albeit with a different line-up these days, and the singer, who has long since sworn off both liquor and drugs, seems these days to be an amiable fellow. Another equivocal review, then, but I almost certainly wasn’t the right person to review it. If anything, Glow points the way to the unabashed 21^st-century rock revivalism of the likes of Kings Of Leon, but with a much more inventive template. And I would much rather listen to Reef’s “Lullaby” than to the one by The Cure.