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If you've been searching for that definitive splice between Grandaddy
and The Beta Band, these Wales boys have answered your
hybrid prayers. Messy Century kicks in backdrops brimming
with loops and swirls where everything sounds like it's getting
sucked backwards into your speakers. Although it's easy to pick
through the contemporary benchmarks of this record, there's the
faintest imprint of a country influence and Crosby, Stills
and Nash harmonies that bleed through the electronic caste.
I could be wrong, but I swear that "UK Theatre" borrows
a gait from Terrence Trent D'arby's "Wishing Well",
as well as any number of Sgt. Pepper's melodies pressed
up through the cracks. The Mountaineers join an illustrious
peer group (Radiohead, Four Tet, Manitoba,
Telefon Tel Aviv) of electronic musicians who thread technology
into their music with a subtlety that verges on invisibility,
or at least technology for the phobic and guitar needy. That's
not to say that each track isn't busy with various bleeps and
echoes and a background that pinballs with skittering accents,
but it does so with a minimum level of structural intrusion. Even
at their weirdest, The Mountaineers clearly want to write plaintive
pop songs, sprawled out and glitchy, but winsomely simple at their
core. Even the far afield numbers such as the distorted twitcher,
"Bom Bom", keep your attention with the Devendra
Banhart through a tin can vocals and a beat that would immediately
pack the dance floors if it didn't keep dropping off the radar,
falling through the bottom and missing every other step. They're
Brits, so you have to expect a certain musical cheekiness always
pulling the rug out from under your ear. For all its imaginative
sewing of beat to acoustic chord, the real treasures in Messy
Century are the sweet snatches of song that make their way
to the top of the fray.
-Terry Sawyer
Track Listing:
1. Ripen
2. Sewing
3. It's Solid
4. I Gotta Sing
5. Belgique Limb
6. Want To Write You
7. UK Theatre
8. Backgrounds
9. All My Life
10. Bom Bom
11. Gruppen
12. Apart From This
13. Silent Dues
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