A Sporadic Sprawl Of Beauty
Ever wondered what the world would be like if Syd Barrett had written songs for The Stone Roses or The Verve? Yeah, me too, and I think these guys must have shared our thoughts, and even launched the experiment. The Somatics make the noises, at least, that I'm sure would have come out of the combining of these great legends, their music is a psychedelic kind of free-for-all madness, tied down by some very well structured true pop.
The vocals are recorded in that far-off phasing that we were all introduced to on The Beatles' Sgt. Peppers, and that became part of the everyday airwaves in the early nineties when Ian Brown and Richard Ashcroft and Tim Burgess hit our eardrums constantly. The guitars go from Muse-like massive prog stanzas to Mars Volta-esque twizzles and swizzles to even Coldplay-like epic grandness. And the songs range from sprawling wildness with occasional beautiful bits like opener 'Mercury Rising', to concise pop snippets, which would survive in your record collection next to My Vitriol and Broken Social Scene, exampled in 'Rebound'.
I'd even go so far as to liken this music to that of Space, with specific reference to that equally edifying and haunting refrain in 'The Female of The Species', 'The Lost Weekend' is like a far-out version of this with something picked up from Blur and processed through some 70s experimental wanderings. Yeah, their music's grand, a culmination of differing styles of the past 20 years, presented in a montage of warring sound that creates a phantasm in the mind of all sorts of out-there stuff...
There's a melange of delay and string bending, banging of percussion and scraping of vocal chords, metal and flesh and bone enamel all gathering together to create some intergalactic orgy of wild imaginings. It's the inner-mind, the introspective psyche giving vent through sound, and it's electrifying.
Bang, and then there the beat comes back, in 'The Lost Weekend', we're back down to Earth after having been taken on journey for a few minutes through a place where there's no time and no space. It's a great illustration of something impossible to illustrate. It continues on like a modern-day 'A Day In The Life' and cites all sorts of British history and what have you, the normal going through the motions.
Yes, yes, it's very good indeed. An epic of Youthmovie Soundtrack Strategies proportions, but more fun to listen to, and more engrossing, engaging and encompassing. And after 16 minutes we're done, unlike The Mars Volta you notice the song's length, but unlike countless others who try and fail at writing an encapsulating epic you want to listen to it all.
Very clever in 'Remote' to stick the mobile phone interference noise in the music after mentioning a phone in the lyrics... And it's a real class song too, lyrically superb! Probably the highlight of the album, if you like clever, witty wordplay... I'm too tired to get clever with my wordplay right now, so I'll say only this; The Somatics have made something here worthy of the ears of anyone who thinks they have integrity when it comes to taste in music. Take those thumping beats and wandering basslines of The Stone Roses, put them with early Floyd and late Beatles vocals and throw in some poetic genius for the lyrics, it's a good concoction, and it works brilliantly...