(#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 21st-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.