These New Puritans, Hidden

These New Puritans, Hidden
Angular/Domino



Two amazing albums in one month? And I haven’t even had time to listen to Four Tet, Vampire Weekend, Beach House, or Magnetic Fields, et cetera and et cetera, yet. (Note: Yeasayer is out in February, officially. But who cares about official release dates, right?)

Is January turning into a perennial bumper crop of music in the same way as it always is for cinema, with movies trying to cash in during awards season? Too bad these awesome albums are preening and posing for an awards ceremony that doesn’t exist. Sometimes it’s kind of sad that the Brits and the Mercury Prize are so pathetic (and that there’s no real alternative since NME took its finger off the pulse about five years ago), but on the other hand it’s distinctly satisfying that brave and innovative albums like the one I'm about to review aren’t lowered to competing on a shortlist with La Roux or The Killers for a hollow golden token which serves only to place a full stop at the end of a career spurt while allowing hacks to move on to the Next Big Thing.

Well, These New Puritans were The Next Big Thing a couple of years ago; I was totally in love with their debut Beat Pyramid and pissed off that so much criticism of the band was based around them being pale, angular and from Southend, which in a pre-Primary Colours world was still a joke ("Look at those naff provincials with their pretentious sixth form ‘philosophy’ and ironic love of Wu-Tang Clan", etc).

Well, no. They’re just weird. Like the many of the genuinely great musicians, composers and artists of the past 50, no – 100 years? 200? Not that I’m pushing the whole ‘tortured genius/mad artist in his garret’ thing, which is one of those ridiculous clichés that means nice and talented people are seen as ‘lesser’ in comparison to bastard miserly megalomaniacs with vast and delicate egos, like some of the sainted ‘legends’ of rock and pop sneering at me from the semi-matt covers of respectable music monthlies. Naturally, I digress.

So, Hidden. The second album from These New Puritans. But first: did you hear that Blakroc record? Where the Black Keys teamed up with Wu Tang, Ludacris and Mos Def to play hip hop with live instruments? Well, turn that concept inside out. Invert that shit. This is electronic beats, razor sharp production and white boy vocals, nasal and half-mumbled – and oh yes, did I mention the bassoon motif popping up throughout the album?

‘We Want War’ is the single; you may well have heard it by now – make sure you soak up the gorgeous video embedded above. Bear in mind that it's the first single, and it's seven minutes long. The production is really what hits you first. Though Beat Pyramid showed a lot of flair and innovation from such a young band, TNP have clearly made staggering leaps ahead. The silvery shrrrring! of a gleaming sword pulled from its hilt couldn’t be a sharper contrast to the cavernous gravity of the bass and beats, showing that the band’s production sensibility is first and foremost a hip hop one, focused on pristine sounds and rigid rhythms, with vocals taking a supporting role.

The beat on ‘Thought Rush’, for instance, a track on the Rough Trade bonus CD, is very, very much like that 2003 number ‘Never Leave You (Uh Oooh Uh Oooh)’ by Lumidee, which, interestingly, is a much worse version of the Ol' Dirty Bastard track 'Welcome Home' - no doubt TNP had both those songs very much in mind. It’s also weirdly sparse and more ‘live’ sounding than any track on the album proper, and also includes some brilliantly inappropriate bassoon polyphony near the end.

Also on the extra CD, a competent dark and techy remix of ‘We Want War’ ticks some boxes, but I’m sure it’s only the tip of the iceberg for dissecting Hidden into dozens of incredible remixes. The inclusion of an instrumental version of the track – thoroughly listenable in its own right, so well produced is it - is surely a canny move. Also, an alternative mix of ‘Hologram’ offers a cleaner, stronger vocal performance and a captivating piano arrangement which is about 94,758 galaxies away from the usual ‘piano song’ on an indie album, and in fact reminds me a touch, what with Jack’s half-spoken Estuary lines, of a couple of the almost jazzy arrangements on Original Pirate Material (the ones that had less to do with Mike Skinner, we must assume).

‘White Chords’ is also ripe for a seriously good remix, with a Thom Yorke style vocal and light and dark elements flashing in and out; a girlish ‘ooh’ reverberates and glitchy buttons ripple as the bass spreads out thick and spacious over a dubsteppy beat.

‘5’, the album’s coda, is weird, subtle and oddly affecting, and sees Jack Barnett try his hand at pure composition. Apparently he had to learn notation and write the bassoon sections ‘deaf’, as it were, before the band travelled to the Czech Republic to hear it played to them for the first time by a 13-piece brass and woodwind ensemble. A number of influences make themselves known, including, I suppose, Benjamin Britten and Edward Elgar, as the band has mentioned in interviews, but there's also a Reich/Riley-esque minimalist phrase played (I think) on tubular bells and sounding like nothing less than the soundtrack to The Exorcist – which is then butted out by a ghostly children’s choir and Jack Barnett’s sombre, quiet monotone.

Like the rest of Hidden, it’s like nothing I've ever heard - and it's exquisite.

As a final word – please do buy this record. It’s really not going to sell that many copies and this band very much deserve to make another album. Sermon over.

Endnote:

Imagine how good it would be to be a youngish indie fan who’s been learning bassoon for years ‘cos his parents made him, and all he wants is to be Johnny Thunders – wait, this is 2010: Ezra Koenig? – but then he hears this and he’s like, Wicked, now I can be an indie star too, I’m gonna start a band!, etc etc. Cue new generation of proper weird pop, a true post punk revival.

[On a related note, this is of course the reason why a disproportionate amount of girls are into twee. It’s not that females are naturally programmed to prefer pretty ickle tunes with earnest lovesick lyrics (obviously), it’s that it gives bored 15-year-olds a chance to be in a band and put to use those ridiculous violin/flute/piano lessons that Mummy forced on them for 10 years in some sickly remnant of a 19th century ladies’ education, all of which seemed so incredibly boring before but now turns out to be an excellent way to get foppish lads from Upper Sixth to write earnest lovesick lyrics about their wavy red hair and awkward smiles that they hated until they realised their true cultural value in Twee Land. Cue girls on keys/flute/harp etc in twee bands. I'm not sure it's The Answer, but it'll do for now]

These New Puritans, Beat Pyramid

These New Puritans, Beat Pyramid
Domino

Like an agitated teenager adrift from the early 80s, Jack Barnett, the spindly frontman of These New Puritans, has one foot in our digitised urban jungle of tarmac and grime (in the physical and musical senses) and the other in parallel realms of occultist mantras, astrology and mythology. Beat Pyramid, the debut from the malnourished Southend four-piece, is a scatterbrain collection of urgent guitars, drone-fuzz bass, looping textures and wild tangents, veering from danceable post-punk to whirring soundscape interludes, all peppered with an ironic deadpan that makes no bones about its debt to Mark E Smith. The lyrics are both intensely cryptic and laughably banal; a bizarre reference to Michael Barrymore on ‘MKK3’ and the profound emptiness of the repeated “0800, 0800” on ‘Elvis’ place the record in a fantasy galaxy, floating alongside the magickal space-age of Myths Of The Near Future but with its roots in a very British melancholia.

For a debut record it’s an astonishing achievement. An ode to pre-Socratic philosophers on the sparse and fantastically grimy ‘Infinity Ytinifni’ rubs up against the playground punk of ‘Numerology AKA Numbers’ - but it’s obvious that this is a juvenile effort, in the best possible sense. The sheer volume of ideas and influences here could contribute to a truly classic album a few years down the line when they’ve grown out of their ADD mindsets and started drinking grown-up beer. Like when a four year old stops drawing stick-men and progresses to wobbly arms and googly eyes: TNP are way ahead of their peers, but Beat Pyramid ain’t their Mona Lisa. This really is a band that needs to be nurtured properly and not just shoved off the roundabout of indie fame when ‘the new New Puritans’ pop up in about, ooh, three weeks?

26/01/2008

The Horrors NME Awards Show @ Astoria, 16/02/2008

The Horrors + Crystal Castles + These New Puritans + Ulterior
NME Awards Show @ Astoria, 16^th February

Welcome to one of the few genuinely decent line-ups on the never-ending Wagnerian nightmare that is the NME Awards Shows, the most ridiculous, turgid, self-serving piece of marketing guff since, well, the NME Awards. Sadly, Ulterior’s performance will be omitted from this review because nobody will ever convince me that the phrase ‘doors open at 5.30pm’ displays any grasp of logical reasoning. This is a real shame, because Ulterior’s Suicide-shagging-William-Reid industrial noise-drone is far too exciting to miss. Four hours of adverts for Shockwaves, Skins and Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong (a pox on that band for eating into my word count) is more than any creature equipped with opposable thumbs can bear.

These New Puritans capitalise on what must be their biggest show to date, their sound becoming truly enormous propelled by those hip hop drums and nauseating low-frequency basslines. Jack Barnett has apparently come dressed as a Norman swan in chainmail tunic of plastic feathers, his bowl cut balanced precariously on a bird-like neck. A genuinely beguiling frontman, he at least seems to be having fun – Sophie sullenly pokes around on synths, scratching her neck and fighting to stay awake through their grimy, angular onslaught. It’s genius.

The Astoria ain’t quite right for Crystal Castles dirrrty club aesthetic, but that doesn’t stop the half-term rave kids’ sugar rush as they go batshit crazy for Alice’s winged-insect-trapped-in-a-bottle stage moves. Still, the deliciously warped malignancy of ‘Alice Practice’ and fizzing sodapop electro of ‘Air War’ stand out a mile above the samey bleeps of the non-singles, which doesn’t bode well for their upcoming album.

The Horrors return to headline the Astoria barely a year after their opening slot on the Rock’n’Roll Riot Tour, another steaming delight from the NME featuring The Dykeenies, The Maccabees and The Fratellis. Christ. Tighter and louder than ever before (both sartorially and musically), they’ve come a long way since then - this set almost makes the 45 minute mark, and Faris’ inter-song banter is becoming increasingly absurd: “sing for your supper,” he snarls into the mic, cracking himself up in the process. A handful of new songs are previewed, more experimental and less obviously derived from their garage rock bread and butter, and they certainly take themselves a lot less seriously than precocious fellow Southenders TNP or the notoriously snarky Crystal Castles.

At 9.30pm the whole shebang is brought to an untimely close. The crowd scratch their heads. It’s unsettling, but at least there’s time for a pint before the tube closes.

20/02/2008