Disclosure: Jude Rogers –
freelance writer extraordinaire and wife of The Drink's drummer
Daniel Fordham – was involved in the Smoke: A London Peculiar
website, which published some of my work.
~
 |
| The Drink - Capital |
Listening
to Capital - The
second album by London-based, dark-folk oddity, The Drink
- reminded me of the early 1980s, when indie music seemed to
occupy a strange parallel dimension, adjacent to what was going on in
the mainstream.
In this pre-internet age, left-field bands, cocooned
in their own worlds, on the periphery of the British music scene,
hoved haphazardly in and out of my orbit: Momentarily blinking into
existence on FM radio waves, via a John Peel Session; read about in
small articles in one of the weekly music papers, but perhaps never
heard; occasionally granted a flicker of wider exposure in the form
of an incomplete, context-free snippet from a chorus, accompanying a
still, black and white photo, during the Indie Top 10 singles
countdown on The Chart Show.
The Drink draw on
the spirit of this era, along with countless historical DIY efforts
to recalibrate pop music according to some alternative template.
There is a sense of a band going their own way; who, at times, seem
lost in a sea fog between the algorithmic structures of American post
rock, and a kind of far-flung, Anglicised island folk music.
The spindly guitar that methodically works itself into complicated
shapes, as if negotiating the twists and turns of an intricate,
blackboard-bound mathematical formula, doesn't so much provide
structure to these songs as it does define their outer limits. There
are moments on Capital
when it sounds like a
less scattered approximation of the dexterous Congolese Soukous style
of finger picking - a technique that, in sub-Saharan climes, showers
the listener with peels of warm notes. Relocated several lines of
latitude to the north, these exotic chord structures shake off some
of their equatorial looseness, gaining angles and, during the
advancing mantra of The Coming Rain, a
purposeful forward momentum: It's a song that skips about on an undulating African rhythm, tethered to
a vocal that multi-tracks partway through, affecting a slow dissolve
into a false ending, before picking up again where it left off.
The
ten tracks here are unusually detailed in their construction, with some
deliberately unbalanced or marginally out of tune. This makes them
intriguing but difficult to fathom on early listens. The wilfully
off-kilter Hair
Trigger is
sonically
equivalent to one of
those gravity-defying modern skyscrapers that look like they might
fall down at any moment – a fidgety, a-melodic rhythm that jumps
back and forth, or hangs on the spot, while the drummer attempts to
lay down a stabilising beat underneath.
Potter's
Grave – another peculiarity that seems to have been
meticulously pieced together from a grab-bag of ideas – is built
around an intricately looping guitar that assumes a holding pattern
during the lead-in to the chorus.
Adding fluidity to this
cat's cradle of sound, with its zigzagging advances and retreats, is
Dearbhla Minogue, whose untutored vocals float around the higher
registers and recall front-women like Rosie Cuckston (Pram)
and Alison Statton (Young Marble Giants). Unlike Cuckston, who
was happy for her voice to crack as she strained for the top notes,
Minogue stays within the limits of her range. It's a style in keeping
with the overall approach of the band, who
will meticulously explore the outer limits of a musical idea, but in
a very controlled, restrained and methodical manner.
Capital is
an album of curiosities; odd lines that rise from a sea of
lyrical abstraction, such as the oft-repeated “If
you do well in school I'll take yah to the swimming pool” on
Potter's Grave.
I'll
Never Make You Cry simulates walking in on a 1960s girl group, in the early stages of demoing a version of a much bigger song, with place-holder lyrics and
a ponderous bookmark of an instrumental break. This non-traditional,
approach to vocal downtime is repeated on Hair
Trigger with its
sketchy, negative image of a guitar solo, absent power chords.
The
Drink tread a
fine line, carefully micro-managing their sound, but stopping short of allowing these underlying complexities to get in
the way of the songs. On Capital there are
moments of genuine tension and atmosphere. The ominous organ drone
and guitar creep that opens No Memory has the air of a
developing off-shore weather system. It's a song that carries itself
forward, rising and falling on slow-building swells. The drawn-out
coda, ghosted by stray backing vocals, peters out before it can fade
away, as if the band who have thrown so many ideas into this album,
in its final seconds finally ran out of notes to play.
The
Drink – Potter's Grave
The Drink – Capital
(Melodic)
Release Date: 13th
November, 2015
Track Listing and
Timings
1.
Like a River 3:04
2.
You Won't Come Back at All 5:00
3.
Potter's Grave 4:01
4.
Roller 3:27
5.
Hair Trigger 4:30
6. I
Can't Sleep 3:56
7.
The Coming Rain 5:12
8.
I'll Never Make You Cry 3:31
9.
Month of May 3:23
10.
No Memory 5:35
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