You may have heard of a popular Liverpudlian beat combo from the Sixties. One of my favourite stories occurs during the mixing session of their first hit, ‘Please, Please Me’. George Martin, playing back the final mix, turns to the four mop-topped sock robbers and asks “Is there anything in here you don’t like?” George Harrison, very quietly and politely, pipes up: “Actually, I don’t like your tie”.
And I don’t like Andy Proper’s beard, or lack of it. The clean-shaven drummer of local psychedelic rockers Spiral 25 appears on the cover of their debut EP in the company of four hairy monsters, looking highly uncomfortable, like a first-year Divinity student held hostage by a Kings of Leon convention.
Still, I’m happy to report that despite the image clash, when you examine the music, the band sounds integrated, purposeful and energised. The style is a compound of the Stone Roses, The Charlatans and even The Doors, with the emphasis on dense reverb-drenched guitar layers. Modern it ain’t and it lacks sophistication (There’s barely a chord change in the entire four-song record), but after a while the droning simplicity works its magic. And you can dance to it! Sober!
The record opens excellently with the hands-in-the-air anthem ‘Let the Light Shine On’. Russell Denham is in the Tom Meighan mould of vocalists, and he is happy to be wrapped in a billowing sheet of reverb so that the words aren’t always clear, but his strong, blues-influenced melodies sing out with perfect ease over the low-end guitar textures. ‘Signals’ benefits from some clever bass and high-end guitar lines, but lacks form; it occasionally feels more like a successful jam than a song.
The best song on the record is undoubtedly ‘Shadows In Line’ which draws a little oxygen from The Door’s ‘The End’, and while it doesn’t indulge in the Oedipal excesses of Jim Morrison’s demonic classic, the malevolent clean-guitar line and doomy drums (somewhat undermixed throughout the record, incidentally) certainly evokes dangerous, unexplored country. Denham’s singing is well-tuned to the various swells and falls of the epic tale, while the bursts of fuzzy guitar colour at the end cap things off wonderfully.
Today’s Future (Tomorrow’s Past) is a little too similar to what has gone before, but it’s enlivened by Chris Monger’s harmonica playing, an unusual touch in heavy stoner-rock. Overall, the record is a strong piece of work, and in ‘Let the Light Shine On’ and ‘Shadows in Line’ they have two superb specimens of their style. Whether this is a style which can prosper in the era of Lady Gaga and Florence and the Machine remains an imponderable.