What to expect from a band that most thought had split years ago after a producing an excellent but criminally underappreciated debut?
The opening ‘Clean Coloured Wire’ shuffles and bleeps into view, a Teutonic groove that sees the band stretching their limbs and awaking from a deep slumber. 'Hang your Head’ is a surprise, displaying the type of confident muscular swagger missing from their debut album.
‘International Dirge’ and ‘Helped by Science’ have a dreamy narcotic feel, with the Knife Edge String Quartet adding a new dimension to the latter.
‘Brighter As We Fall’ is the centre piece of the album. A simply arranged, gentle love song gives way to a blistering final two minute guitar assault that sounds like Kevin Shields, Robin Guthrie and Exit Calm’s Rob Marshall all playing in the same room at the same time. Genuine hairs up on the back of the neck stuff.
‘Three Fact Fader’ and ‘Crawl from the Wreckage’ are both epic beauties with rock-solid industrial cores, distinguishing them from the whimsical, soporific shoegazing set in which they are often lazily lumped.
For the most part the vocals just sit politely in the mix, almost a perfunctory nod to convention, sometimes slightly at odds with the huge monolithic slabs on which they sit, but on ‘Be What You Are’ the West Coast harmonies come into their own and add to the beauty mix of the Hammond organ/acoustic backdrop.
‘Emergency Room’ shifts things back up a gear before the pulsing electro Motown finale of ‘What Pushed Us Together’.
The only dip is in the slightly pedestrian ‘Song for Andy’ which doesn’t quite make the cut. One average track from thirteen? When was the last time you heard an album with such a pedigree?
Despite the wide range of influences and inspirations (CSNY, Harmonia, Neu!) there is nothing particularly innovative or challenging about this album. It is just a beautifully crafted, sublime work that consistently reaches heights that few other bands can dream about. There’s lots going on but it never feels over-cluttered. During their four year hiatus they’ve clearly busied themselves with mastering every single aspect of their craft leading to the production of a work with instant appeal that actually reveals more and gets better with repeated visits.
Comeback albums don’t get any better than this. It is as good an album as anyone from Wigan has ever made. Anyone who knows their stuff will realise just what a compliment that is.
