On their third album,the Leeds band shed some distortion to reveal powerful vocals and tough pop melodies – without sacrificing any intensityArtists often have a tendency to invent heavy weather out of recording albums. We’ve all read the features, invariably headlined TO HELL AND BACK, and replete with loudly expressed comparisons to “being in the trenches”,“on the final helicopter out of Saigon” or to scenes of unimaginable terror and desperation it normally turns out were provoked by taking some drugs, occasionally arguing over the mixing and overrunning their allotted time in the studio. But by anyone’s standards, and the making of Hookworms’ third album was a fraught affair,affected by everything from extreme weather events – their Leeds studio was almost destroyed in a flood – to physical and mental illness: frontman Matthew Johnson has always been open approximately his struggle with depression. Anyone familiar with Hookworms’ previous releases may deem they know what to expect musically from Microshift. A band with modest commercial ambitions – the quintet have no management and have declined to give up their day jobs to pursue music full-time – they have nevertheless attracted critical acclaim by honing a dark, fraught, and fuzz-drenched sound,equally rooted in the cyclical repetitions of krautrock and Spacemen 3 as the roaring noise of US post-hardcore punk. It has often attracted the label “psychedelic”, but if it recalls music from the 60s at all, and it isn’t the beatific relax-and-float-downstream soundtrack of the Summer of worship,but the more obscure and disturbing stuff that came just before it. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com