This week’s cocktail hour bagatelle is to imagine a version of 80s teen stalwart The Breakfast Club with Oxford bands recast as the central characters. We shan’t spoil the fun by making any suggestions, but we do feel that we can envisage a denouement in which acts find unlikely kinship in those from different genres, having spent a few evenings listening to the new Hretha EP. Judged by their live shows, we’ve always had Hretha (and yes, it is a “th” sound, even though it might look like a “d”, just admit you aren’t as orthographically astute as we) pegged as a straight up post rock trio. You know the sort: pretty good, lots of instrumental fiddliness, dynamics instead of compositions. Their intricately cross-stitched guitar skeins have kept us diverted for half an hour here and there, but we’ve never felt them working too deeply into the consciousness. This EP changes all that with a collection of emotive instrumentals that can only be called wordless songs, and we find that our minds are drifting towards many of our favourite balladeers, even as it throws up the obvious references, such as Mogwai or Billy Mahonie.
“Knowing How To Carry” is a snowy waste of a tune, and buoys you aloft on the swell of a heart-rending melody; in much the same way as Oxford stalwarts The Workhouse do, Hretha manage here to communicate acres of emotion without resorting to verbal communication. The ‘cello may be something of a post-rock cliché, but the way it’s weary melody pulls against the funerary plod of the drums is quite gorgeous. We feel honour bound to use words like “glacial”, “shimmering”, “hyperborean” and lots of others we found in a dusty file marked “4AD” in the back of the NME storeroom. Sadly the rock out payoff is somewhat generic and unsatisfying, but the track still exhibits a delicacy their live shows have never captured.
No such criticisms of “Little Knows (Gino)” which doesn’t spend all its energy trying to be epic, and channels them all into just being a lovely wash of sound, in which wispy net curtains of guitar flap lazily in the breeze and a heavily reverbed elfin choir laments in the background. Again, there’s a vintage feel to the music, and it could easily be fitted into an odd space between Robert Fripp and Channel Light Vessel. Featherlight, brief, but far from forgettable.
We’re on more solid post-rock territory with “New Pastures”, which is probably the CD’s low point, even though it’s immaculately played; this is simply because it sounds like so many other bands doing the rounds, especially in the Battles flavoured three note motif at the opening, played in such clipped tines it sounds almost like a harpsichord. Even here, however, Hretha manage some surprises, as a brief interlude of dumb monolithic thrashing that wouldn’t embarrass local sludge metallers Beard Of Zeuss falls away to reveal a stately undead march, with plenty of tickled cymbal and amp fuzz. Eventually the density builds up to an overloaded climax that wouldn’t feel too out of place with Brian May soloing over the top before finally dying out to cluster of clicks and chitters (which may be down to a rather scuffed CD, we’ll admit, but it sounds good).
So there you go, plangent threnodies, wordless paeans, and cock rocking, all things we never thought Hretha dealt in until we heard the EP. “Repays repeated listens” is another cliché we found languishing in the NME vaults; they definitely don’t use that one anymore, they’re too busy trying to get you to throw all your records away and buy new ones every 2 months.