The latest nom de plume for London-based D.I.Y producer, and former Test Icicle member, Rory Attwell; Warm Brains sounds like the after-effects of electric-shock therapy, or a cannibal’s sorbet. It also goes someway towards describing the inducing state of the hazy and coalesce messy music, found on this double A-sider.
Sharing similar musical traits with bands like S.C.U.M – not surprising, seeing as Attwell has worked with them – there is a desire to languish in the same creepy, shoe-gazing stairwells, and 90s alternative rock imbued corridors. However the staccato, collapsing drum-beaten drone of ‘Let Down’, also laps up elements of Pavement, Sonic Youth and grunge: the tell-tale phrasing, those eerie minor chord changes, and sulky, broody laments on isolation and break-ups amongst soulless disengaged suburbs, are all in evidence. Both wistful and, vaguely, danceable, Let Down features a boy/girl narrative on separation – the elegy cooing tones of Paradise’s Florence Van Camerijk, deliver the most poignant lines.
Imagine if you would, the Stone Roses covering The Electric Prunes, Release Of An Oath, whilst Jason Pierce produces: this would go someway to summarizing the accompanying, “come-down” track, Stone to Sand to Glass. Mournful, mired in a vat of reverb and low resonance, Attwell’s hallowed pray is a call for more harmonious times; or as our chorister himself, so loquaciously puts it: “It’s a song about the destruction of a neighbourhood by city developers, with themes about wanting all the glass obelisks, to turn back to sand and for people to live simpler, less destructive lives, and to be more honest”. Amen to that. This comatose hymn will be the last word; the closing curtain call on the forthcoming LP, ‘Old Volcanoes’, due out in August.
Warm Brains’ first single is a opiate-fuelled, binge of dreamy opulence and dispirited introspection: a perfect formula for melancholy alternative rock.
Released – 18/07/2011
[Rating:4]
