The sound of Nottingham’s Soundcarriers seems both right and wrong. One can hear in the opening bars of their second record, Celeste, their interests and influences from the contemporary to the obscure: early Stereolab, Birmingham’s underappreciated Broadcast, the cool Kosmische Musik of Neu! and Can, the psychedelic era of Italian composers Ennio Morricone and Piero Umiliani, and the gamut of 70s jazz-funk from the cinematic music library (one reviewer has mentioned the Pentangle as well, but I don’t hear it). Perhaps the time is right for bands to look in this direction, to hear sounds from another side of the record store, to discover (I would say re-discover, but much of this music has never seen the light of day given to full-fledged mainstream releases) the music the counterhip themselves are listening to: that not-much-discussed subcultural group who oppose trendy taste and suggest alternatives at every corner. You like the Velvet Underground & Nico? Rubber Soul-era Beatles? Try listening to the Monks’ Black Monk Time. You like Love’s Forever Changes? May I present for your listening pleasures The Millennium’s Begin.
Now that girl groups (Vivian Girls, Best Coast), classic American rock (Fleet Foxes, Midlake), and post-punk orchestras (Arcade Fire, Joanna Newsom (trust me)) rule the indie airwaves, there’s sonic surprise in the ground the Soundcarriers are exploring. And there’s much to be found, and plundered, that is neither under scrutiny by the mainstream musical press nor supported by the trend-making blogosphere.
What’s wrong is more complicated. Their weakness is not that they sound the same as these other musics – they are, like so many others, the sum of their influences with the added x-factor of not being their influences – but that they sound the same as themselves over and over again: the same cool boy-girl vocal combination occurs on almost every song, the drums are always sharp and upfront in the mix, the keyboards are bright, the bass thick and the guitar thin. All of this works on a number of key tracks, including ‘Step Outside’, ‘Long Highway’, ‘There Only Once’, and the stand-out, ‘Signals’, throughout which co-songwriter Paul ‘Pish’ Isherwood’s bass rumbles with a virtuosity and grooviness that falls somewhere between Holger Czukay and Carol Kaye (which is to say I can’t praise it enough). But overall, listening to Celeste on repeat on whatever iThingy is your fancy, samey-ness and repetition become the band’s most coherent signature. All this suggests that while they have the right sound, they haven’t written the right songs to present it to listeners with.
There’s an ep’s worth of good, interesting music here, and some great playing and sounds throughout. But nothing mandatory, nothing demanding of the listeners attention over the length and through the heart of this one-hour recording.