Reviews originally published in Issue 91 of Electronic Sound magazine, July 2022:

WORKING MEN’S CLUB
Fear Fear
(Heavenly)

Should we play Working Men’s Club review bingo? The Golden Lion in Todmorden! Syd Minsky-Sargeant’s ‘SOCIALISM’ t-shirt! They were indie, now they’re synth-pop! Having barely scraped into their twenties, WMC are already a band with enough baggage to fill a double seat on the TransPennine Express to Manchester Victoria. And – for the full house – put Manchester on there as well. The new Mark E Smith! Oh, come on. As long as he lives, Minsky-Sergeant will never stain enough pub ceilings to fill those particular plastic loafers.

Still, there’s enough of Smith’s curmudgeonly contrariness at play here to warm the cockles of middle-aged Peel obsessives. How best to kick off that high-pressure second album? With half a minute of monotone, buzzsaw synth, of course. A half-empty pint glass parked on the keyboard, and two fingers flicked through the windows of the Hebden Bridge Trades Club. Such is the uncompromising welcome afforded by album opener ‘19’, before the hiss of utilitarian drum machines transform it into the bastard son of ‘Being Boiled’. And ‘19’? Yes, the dreaded ‘VID… but also Minsky-Sargeant’s age when penning this vulnerable lockdown allegory. It’s nature’s revenge as dark sexual encounter: “A timid dirty whisper, a flicker in the eye / She beckons as he shivers, he lunges as he cries…”

The title track is similarly uncompromising, a lament for the Zoom generation heralded by a cavalcade of police siren keyboards. But the band – Minsky-Sargeant plus bassist Liam Ogburn and synth/guitar players Mairead O’Connor and Hannah Cobb –  are at their most potent when casting off post-punk austerity and throwing themselves into pop decadence. Lead single ‘Widow’ shifts the album up a gear, its earworm synths a clear tip of the trilby to Vince Clarke-era Depeche Mode. “Lust was easy until you died / Now I fuck inside my head but not outside” deadpans Minsky-Sargeant. It’s a uniquely defiant breed of teenager that measures the loss of pandemic life by the reduction of leg-over opportunities, but the song is a belter. Elsewhere, and true to form, he boldly walks the line between cocky self-assurance and knowing self-mockery. “Why would thy care? Thou must just be bluffing,” he growls on the house-influenced ‘Ploys’ – sounding for all the world like the missing link between Frankie Knuckles and Last Of The Summer Wine.

“The first album was mostly a personal documentation lyrically,” Minsky-Sargeant has professed. “This is a blur between personal and a third-person perspective of what was going on.” It’s an approach nailed immaculately on ‘Cut’, the album’s true moment of unalloyed foot-shuffling pop. It’s brilliant. Infectious. A rallying cry to rise from the rubble of a broken Britain. “All the time it’s just running around my soul / Got to give it, got to take it, got to break it, got to make it”, he stammers as mellifluous guitar lines ascend around him, dragging Calder Valley gloom into tentative sunshine. “Resurrect this land, and take what’s left…”

It’s a slicker, fuller sound than their first album, and further still from the organic rumblings of 2019 debut single ‘Bad Blood’. The band, lest we forget, has undergone a complete line-up change since those early, brutal warning shots. But Arctic Monkeys producer Ross Orton has returned to hole them up in his Sheffield studio, and while the echoes of nascent Human League experiments undoubtedly linger, it’s perhaps the legacy of another Steel City luminary that is felt most profoundly: Jarvis Cocker. Although Minsky-Sargeant seems unlikely to don corduroy flares and knitted ties at any point in his career, the deadpan delivery, powerhouse synths and spiralling guitar chops certainly carry a whiff of the gritty, thwarted glamour that characterised the pre-fame Pulp.

Elsewhere, the minimalist ‘Heart Attack’ has an irresistable disco bassline – a Calder Valley Chic, if you will – and closer ‘The Last One’ is danceable, dark psychedelia with a whiff of Stone Roses. Still, it’s easy for middle-aged reviewers to play Spot The Influence. Minsky-Sargeant, one imagines, cares nary a jot for such cynical indulgence, and nor should he. As half the artists mentioned above will testify, second albums can be a bugger to get right, but Working Men’s Club have done everything by the book: ridden out a cavalcade of praise with a record that builds and burgeons without ever losing the essential essence of… well, whatever it was that made them great in the first place. In their case? Uncompromising Northern belligerence and the undoubted promise of even greater things to come. Cross that off your bingo card and clear another seat on the next train out of Todmorden.   

Album available here:
https://workingmensclub.bandcamp.com/album/fear-fear

THE HARDY TREE
Common Grounds
(Clay Pipe)

“I researched the names of the people who had lived in my flat before me, viewed old census returns from the surrounding area, and noted the birth places and livelihoods of past residents,” says Frances Castle of the inspiration behind this, her first Hardy Tree album since 2017. “I began to see the ghosts of these people on my walks, and notice the things that they had left behind…”

Since 2010, Castle’s Clay Pipe label has quietly soundtracked the hidden places. It’s a gentle wilderness of a catalogue, dotted with the moss-coated ruins of the abandoned, the forgotten, the overgrown. Disused railway platforms and crepuscular hamlets abound. The inaugural release? The Fields Lie Sleeping Underneath, Castle’s debut Hardy Tree album and a lo-fi patchwork of half-remembered North London history. Twelve years on, she remains the most unobtrusive of urban potterers, peering through park railings and drifting between the headstones of municipal churchyards.

The journey even starts with the creak of a rusty gate. ‘A Garden Square In The Snow’ is a pale winter’s morning of an album opener, a soft flurry of harpsichord and frost-speckled mellotron. ‘The Spire Of St Mary’s’ adds elegiac piano and a grief-stricken violin. And while ‘Shop Fronts And Parked Cars’ is the wistful intrusion of modernity, the Casio-fuelled march of 21st century hubbub, it clearly rouses the translucent remnants of Castle’s beloved ghosts. Because, from hereon, their presence is felt. A heavy presence at the album’s shoulder, both chilling and comforting. ‘Mist On The Playing Fields’ boasts a throbbing electronic heartbeat, the lingering sugar rush of long-ago school kickabouts. And ‘Face At The Window, Seafourth Crescent’? As softly uncanny as the title suggests. Keyboards dance across longwave static, a haunting memory of disquieting feelings amid the dark Victorian houses of Highbury.

‘Up On The Hill’ is the anthemic conclusion. A strident hymn, filled with purposeful woodwind, it pays fulsome tribute to those circling spectres. But it also celebrates the simple joys of the present, even when those joys are rooted in a faded, half-hidden past. Like the album as a whole, it’s a good a summation as any of the ethos of Castle’s superlative label.

Album available here:
http://www.claypipemusic.co.uk/2022/06/the-hardy-tree-common-grounds.html

FRESH PEPPER
Fresh Pepper
(Telephone Explosion)

It’s the small hours. Neon spills from low-rent bars onto rain-sodden pavements; silent taxis sail deserted streets. Lovelorn loners drain the dregs of smudged shot glasses and shuffle forlornly into moonlit misery. Rarely since the heyday of Tom Waits has barfly melancholy been captured so exquisitely. Not surprisingly, since saxophonist Joseph Shabason and former Deadly Snakes frontman André Ethier have poured their own experiences of manning Toronto’s late-night eateries into this wonderfully evocative collection.

Opener ‘New Ways Of Chopping Onions’ sets the tone perfectly. “Sous chef, dry your eyes…” growls Ethier, as Shabason’s breathy sax floats into orange skies. ‘Prep Cook In The Weeds’ stirs in hints of Bob James’ world-weary 1970s jazz, ‘Seahorse Tranquilizer’ sees Destroyer frontman Dan Bejar joining Ethier to prop up the bar. “Every table gets a rose / Every table gets a candle” they croon, with cocktail piano and the babble of restaurant hubbub slowly fading into emptiness around them. Pull up your collar, switch out the lights. No-one’s going home lonely tonight.

Album available here:
https://freshpepper.bandcamp.com/album/fresh-pepper

WARREN ‘KANINEN’ RASMUSSEN
Raedsel Fra Manekatten
(DAAM)

The lost soundtrack to the Faroe Island’s “first and only foray into late night horror programming”, anyone? It’s debatable whether anyone watching the Sjónvarp Føroya channel in 1983 really did tune into ‘Raedsel Fra Manekatten’ (translation: ‘Terror Of The Mooncat’) and lose themselves in the experimental synth score of the enigmatic Rasmussen, but even if the whole strange backstory is vrøvl of the highest degree, it’s still great fun. ‘En Mørk Tid’ and ‘Martas Skyld’ are spookily sparse, and the anthemic ‘Hverdagen Er Altid Den Samme’ conjures up images of a Subarctic Garth Marenghi.

Album available here:
https://difficultartandmusic.bandcamp.com/album/r-dsel-fra-m-nekatten

FIELD GLASS
Kin
(Happy Robots)

It’s like the Edwardian era never happened. Two whiskery Dickensian scientists, all sideburns and stovepipes, create a time portal to transport a Minikorg to 1862. That’s brothers Dan and Jacob Mayfield, lashing up gas-powered synths to tinkly dulcimers and wheezy Victorian organs to breathe life into this glorious debut album, recorded as live in a deconsecrated Ramsgate church. ‘Fulgurite’ is a chiming homage to the sculpted rocks created by lightning strikes; ‘Rooftops’ the sound of sinister music boxes in abandoned playrooms. Stap me vitals, there’s alchemy at work here. 

Album available here:
https://difficultartandmusic.bandcamp.com/album/r-dsel-fra-m-nekatten

FLOODLIGHTS
Let All The Light In
(Modern Aviation)

Keen to bolster their squad, Floodlights have brought in a rash of new signings for this, their third album. Midfield stalwarts Mat Handley, Harriet Lisa and John Alexander are joined by flamboyant Portuguese strikeforce Stellarays, who bring continental flair to ‘Tomorrow And Its Tomorrows’, and Swiss international Rupert Lally, who adds driving beats to ‘The Last Voice You’ll Hear’. But the core Floodlights ethos remains: hypnotic, organic synth melodies driven by gentle rhythms, with delicious jazz and post-rock flavourings. A comfortable home win.  

Album available here:
https://musiqueparavion.bandcamp.com/album/let-all-the-light-in

IAN DANIEL KEHOE
Yes Very So
(Tin Angel)

Imagine an alternate 1980s where a 45-year-old John Lennon strokes his grey beard, the Dakota carpets strewn with Talk Talk and Human League LPs. The resulting opus might sound a little like Toronto-based Kehoe, who infuses immaculate synth-pop with a delightfully Lennonesque sneer. “Every action has a consequence, even the ones you don’t do” he snarls amid the slick beats of ‘Sweet & Sour’. But Kehoe is far from indolent: this is his fifth album since 2019, and combines instrumental nods to Yellow Magic Orchestra with wistful pop like ‘Art Work Circle’. A delight.

Album available here:
https://tinangelrecords.bandcamp.com/album/yes-very-so

Electronic Sound – “the house magazine for plugged in people everywhere” – is published monthly, and available here:
https://electronicsound.co.uk/

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