Munch Munch - Double Visions (Album)

Prior to recording their debut album, Bristolian quartet Munch Munch felt compelled to lay down some ground rules for themselves, (apparently in order to curb their maximalist tendencies), which included sacking off guitars entirely and limiting themselves solely to live percussion. You’d think such restrictive tenets would result in the whole thing sounding a bit constrained, but Double Visions is a gloriously creative hotchpotch of songs. To call it pop is simultaneously accurate and misleading, because, sure, there are hooks present, but there are bloody dozens of them. The record seems to have been built from little 30-odd second snippets which have been chopped up, put back together in no particular order and then sliced into ten songs seemingly for the sake of convention. As a result, it’s a pretty disorienting listen initially, but it doesn’t take long for the boisterousness and sheer fucking fun of the likes of Wedding and Bold Man of the Sea to come gushing over you like some heaven-sent remedy to the miseries of the Northern Winter. Not many bands are ambitious enough to attempt an album like Double Visions, even fewer are clever enough to actually pull it off.

5/5

Her Name is Calla Interview

These are exciting times for Her Name is Calla. Having spent six or so years making music together, they have reached a stage precious few bands attain, where their music is so utterly unique and so magically enriching that you marvel at the fact that mere human beings should be capable of creating such a thing. It’s a very good time for the band to be releasing their debut album then, and we recently caught up with Tom from the band for a bit of a natter about it.

For the benefit of those of us who enjoy being able to neatly categorise their record collection, the first thing we want clearing up is the thorny issue of whether forthcoming record The Quiet Lamb is their debut, or whether that would be 2008’s The Heritage? “I consider The Quiet Lamb our second album but some of the other guys don't and acknowledge it as our first. We're an unnecessarily complicated bunch of people, sorry. The difference for me would be how the record works as a cohesive whole, which I feel both albums do. That said, you could also consider that we intended The Quiet Lamb to be a full album, and so may have approached it differently from the start. That might not be true of The Heritage”.

So clearly, the band’s opinions differ on the semantics. They do, however, show an entirely united front on the much more important issues surrounding the creation of the music. The thoughtful sound of The Quiet Lamb was borne out of a determination not to hurry things, but although this approach has yielded an astonishing piece of music, it wasn’t without the odd wobble: “I always knew the album would be finished and released as it's a hugely important piece of work for us. We wouldn't have just let it fall by the wayside. But our promise to ourselves was that we wouldn't rush it and that we'd get it as close to perfect as we could. Obviously, the moment we sent it to Denovali for pressing we totally shit ourselves and found there were things that we wanted to change, but sometimes it's important to just let go. We recognised that we'd completed the album to the best of our abilities in quite difficult circumstances. For sure there were a few moments along the way where things seemed really bleak and unending. We scrapped the entire album recordings about four or five times, I think.”

To make life even trickier, the current economic climate means that a harsh reality of life for any musicians who aren’t selling out arenas is the ongoing problem of earning enough money to simply keep going, something Tom has recently highlighted in the band’s blog. Something that can’t help matters is the emergence of a culture in which people view it as their right to help themselves to music for free: “I think it's a disappointment. I don't have much money at all, but when I'm able to buy a record it makes it all that more special. I don't download music illegally. What's the point? I'd be a contradiction. It affects us hugely. Some folks think that it is only an issue for big bands but if anything it's the other way around. It's harder for the smaller bands or the bands that are just breaking out to a bigger audience. We give plenty of music away for free and there are plenty of tracks from the new album that are available to stream. Ultimately, downloading the album via illegal means does directly damage us as well as our label. I think it should be our choice to make it available for free download or not. That's something we chose for our first album and and EP we released earlier in the year.”

Given Tom’s feelings towards the pleasures of the physical specimen of a record, it’s no surprise that the presentation of their music is important to the band, resulting in the wooden box special edition of The Quiet Lamb: “We didn't put all this effort into making an album so that iTunes and MySpace could compress the living fuck out of it. I buy my music and there are people out there who do the same, so this album is for them, the folks who like to feel a record in their hands, smell it and leaf their way through a beautiful booklet of artwork whilst the record plays.”

From an entirely musical standpoint, although The Heritage was an extremely impressive piece of work, The Quiet Lamb feels like a big step up for the band, not just in terms of running time, but in terms of its scale, and an all-pervading sense of grandeur about the thing. With regard to how the two records sit together, Tom recognises more differences than similarities: “Both albums are fairly autobiographical. There are parts which are total creation, but those parts are far and few between. Mostly it documents the relationship with my ex-wife, the shit I put her through. There are certain punishments that I expect. If the album sounds personal it's because it is. The Heritage was more about the past and the future and what we'll leave behind. The Quiet Lamb is very much present tense. I'm happier with The Quiet Lamb. It's the first album where we worked together as a full band. It feels more complete and I'm happier with the arrangements and production. Even though both albums were just recorded in our houses, with the new album we were just a bit more experienced and found a better way of working.”

Although they are now freed from the recording environment, Tom expects the band to be no less busy over the next twelve months: “We'll do a few tours, and we are already in the initial stages of a new record that we'd like to release next year if all works out. We've also recorded a collaborative album with our friends The Monroe Transfer. That should come out early next year; it's just being mixed at the moment. There are all sorts of side projects and things going on as well.” So if for any reason the seventy-five minute masterpiece of The Quiet Lamb doesn’t slake your thirst for all things Calla, there’s plenty more music on the horizon. Can’t wait...

Ou Est le Swimming Pool - The Golden Year (Album)

When their singer Charlie Haddon died on August 20^th this year, it meant that the release of the debut album by Ou Est Le Swimming Pool would pale almost entirely into insignificance. The story of the end of Charlie’s life is an awful one, and there is nothing I can add to it that you haven’t read already. While it would be completely crass for me to talk about The Golden Year without acknowledging the tragedy which preceded it, it would be equally wrong to discuss the album exclusively in the context of Charlie’s death. Chances are that if you’re reading this, then you know the background, and you’re probably here to get an idea of what the album sounds like.

For the most part, The Golden Year sees Ou Est Le Swimming Pool building on the reputation which their previous singles built for them as doyens of punchy synth pop. The album houses a good five or six instances where the band completely and utterly hit their mark from a pop point of view, snaring you with a catchy chorus or insistent synth line and refusing to let go. ‘Dance the Way I Feel’ and ‘Jackson’s Last Stand’, in particular, provide the sort of devastatingly effective thrill out of seemingly simplistic ingredients which so many bands strive for, but which few achieve as completely as this.

When you’ve hit on a successful formula for pop perfection, there’s always a danger of overdoing it, and laying it on too thick with the hooks which has the inevitable impact of diluting their effectiveness. This is a pitfall which Ou Est Le Swimming Pool sidestep here, because The Golden Year isn’t played out entirely at full speed, with the pop stompers broken up with the odd slowie. While the more downbeat moments like ‘Our Lives’ don’t necessarily show the band playing their strongest hand, they are useful in saving The Golden Year from overwhelming you with boisterousness (aka The Passion Pit effect).

In spite of anyone’s best efforts to separate The Golden Year apart from its background, it was always likely that there would be one or two moments where its context would result in moments more poignant than the band probably intended them to be. ‘Better’s occasional dark sentiments, although masked by an upbeat melody, make for pretty difficult listening: “The quiet walls are more help than a friend could be”. A similar effect is created by the waves of delicate hope which open up the album on ‘You Started’, particularly its “You have started the beginning of my life” refrain.

Whether or not The Golden Year will prove to be the only album Ou Est Le Swimming Pool ever release is, at the time of writing, unclear, and is something which is a private decision for the band’s remaining members to make in their own good time. Clearly, if they do continue it will be with an entirely different dynamic to that which produced this record, a dynamic which at once shows the finely honed instincts the band possessed even at this early stage, as well as highlighting the potential they had for the future. Hopefully the strength of the album means that this is what Charlie Haddon will be remembered for, rather than the manner of his death.

7/10

Her Name is Calla - The Quiet Lamb (Album)

The five years since Her Name is Calla’s first recordings have been punctuated by a steady stream of releases, but The Quiet Lamb represents their debut album (they apparently consider 2008’s The Heritage a mini album). Clearly they are not a band to be unduly rushed into anything, and they have recently pointed out the efforts they have made to ensure that the record is as perfect as it could be. This is quite a refreshing approach, really. You only get to make one debut album, and the age of accelerated consumption in which we live means that a band who are pressured into rushing out something half-cooked might never get a chance to rectify the situation.

The unhurried philosophy to producing the album is something which can be clearly discerned on listening, because it sounds painstakingly considered. It is an approach which fits Her Name is Calla’s sound perfectly, and the result is that The Quiet Lamb sounds utterly majestic. Like The Heritage before it, it is far from an easy listen, and its seventy plus minutes are splashed with far more dark shades than light ones, but it is a hugely well-executed piece of work. The attention to detail which has gone into it is clear from its sequencing. The album flows wonderfully, right from the portentous openings of Moss Giant, into the desolate, moody A Blood Promise, through to Pour More Oil which sees the emotion which has built up finally being vented. There are times on the album where you find one song has drifted into another without you even noticing the transition, such is its smoothness and completeness.

One of the most impressive things about The Quiet Lamb is its diversity, which adds breadth to its grandeur, but never takes away any of its coherence. The combination of wintry beauty and bombast is underpinned by occasional departures in tone like the funereal folk of Homecoming, or the closing trio of The Union, which veers from triumphal otherworldly brilliance, to ambient beauty, to some kind of insane soundtrack to a sunset horseback pursuit. The album’s undoubted centre piece though is Condor and River, a gorgeous mini-epic which feels like the album in microcosm, building entirely at its own pace from placid beginnings into something so luxurious that seventeen minutes wash by in an instant.

With The Quiet Lamb, Her Name is Calla have managed to simultaneously build on their previous work and open up new doors. One of the key components in how good they are is the fact that they sound like no other band, a genuinely unique proposition who keep adding more and more components to their sound. Their decision to take things at their own pace has been entirely vindicated, because the album is a wonderful slow-burning success. Even if it takes another five years for them to follow up, it’s okay, because there’s plenty here to sustain us in the interim.