It took me a couple of years to really appreciate how good Squid's debut album Bright Green Fields was. Densely woven, complex rhythmically, with tracks suddenly and dramatically veering off at extreme oblique tangents. It was exhilarating to listen to, yet at the same time demanding to keep up with. It was music you definitely needed to devote time to. This was not remotely casual listening, or something you'd have on ambient in the background. Drummer and singer Ollie Judge still remains central to their sound. His rough hewn vocal style, part shout, part rough falling cliff face, was in your face a lot on the debut. It is an acquired taste. Though here on O Monolith it has moments that feel softer and more modulated, less abrasive, reflective even.
The Squid style at its most fluid and refined is present on O Monolith, on (Swing) In A Dream and Undergrowth. Post punk, musically exploratory and experimental, its hard to discern exactly what any of this is about lyrically. If anything. I'm not sure their lyrics are that message driven, they seem too imaginatively oblique for that. There is a palpable feeling on O Monolith of a band wanting to flex n stretch its boundaries outside the confines of those recognisable Squid-like musical structures. At times they sound less post punk and more 'progressive' rock. Then, as on The Blades, they have moments of Post Rock and ape the simple grandiosity of Godspeed You Black Emperor. Do an abrupt about face and its off somewhere else, and we are left once again playing catch up.
Not everything on O Monolith strikes me as successful. Devils Den reminds me of a seventies Italian Prog Rock band PFM I was into in my teens. And there is a little too much on this album that does have a similar style of over-straining musical cleverness and showing off, that can be a wee bit tiresome. Goodness, though, they are a tight tight band now, almost completely arse clenched, but impressively so. Either their third album will definitively nail the whole thing, or they'll descend into completely abstract noodling, or decide they've already done enough, reached a dead end, then split. O Monolith has the aura of an album that falls unsatisfactorily between two stools, moving away from one style toward an as yet not fully formed evolution. In the process not convincing anyone fully. It has moments of sheer joy followed by a rather flatulent let down. This is just half of a great album.
CARROT REVIEW - 5/8 ( currently )
No comments:
Post a Comment