“Ghost Town” by The Specials. “Paperback Writer” by The Beatles. “Breakout” by Swing Out Sister. We all have our pantheon of perfect pop songs, three-minute nuggets of joy that cannot be bettered one iota, but just as exciting and cherishable are mysterious records, tracks that don’t quite make sense, songs that never entirely resolve themselves into something solid. Amongst the great music that never fully reveals itself – Robert Johnson, Erik Satie, Lee Perry, The Fall – we might find nestled our very own Ally Craig, as his new single is intriguing, mysterious, and somehow sparse and complex simultaneously.
We open with a plucked, clockwork chicken guitar, that sounds for all the world just some disco pants and a voodoo doll away from funk legends The Meters. This one note stroll suddenly tumbles into an odd descending figure, and sets the tone for the rest of the track as “lopsided”. As the song develops it fattens up with some chunky guitar and drums, yet never loses the awkwardness of its central rhythm, until it sounds like a pompous rock epic crumpled up and condensed like discarded notepaper. The lyrics don’t give much away either, the narrator wondering whether he could become a cyborg, and graduating eventually to mindlessly playing computer games (err, we think). In between he informs us, “I find my beauty in/ Bridges and cities, and/ The angular spirals we/ Both draw.” Who is this comic book urban wastrel, and what should we think about him? Oddly, we’re reminded of James Joyce’s pretentious genius Stephen Dedalus, whose sententious statements (“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”) seem in equal parts risible and philosophical. Before we know it, a hesitant guitar plays the descending figure again, like an uncertain question, and is inaudibly answered by a muffled drumroll. The end.
If “Angular Spirals” is an enigma, flipside “You Gets What You Pays For” is completely impenetrable, with more clucking pullet plucking (is this a side effect of Craig’s unusual perpendicular playing technique?), fat guitars like Shellac at a mild canter, obscure lyrics about can openers, and a sax that sounds like a punchdrunk wasp. The whole tune appears to be an excuse to develop an eerie little motif that resembles a suspense cue from Perry Mason. Believe us, we’ve listened to this single a lot, and we still find ourselves asking the same questions: What are these tracks about? Why are they shaped so unostentatiously strangely? Why are they so amazing? Why doesn’t Ally step up his release schedule, because he has it in him to make one of the great Oxford albums? Answers on a postcard.