VESSELS: abstract, accessible, aggressive, ambitious, attuned, basolithic, careful, cerebral, classical, clinical, complex, controlling, cool, cubist, delicate, difficult, eclectic, emotional, exciting, exploratory, explosive, expressionist, extreme, feathered, formal, hedonistic, holistic, impressionist, ingenious, instrumental, intricate, internally motivated, intuitive, jazz, layered, learned, live, loud, meticulous, multiform, nuanced, original, passionate, performance, polyrhythmic, popular, postmodern, precise, profligate, progressive, psychedelic, reflective, resonant, restrained, rock, soundscape, tectonic, tentative, thunderous, traditional, unselfconscious, vocal, whispering.
VESSELS: Tim Mitchell, drums; Martin Teff, guitar, bass; Tom Evans: guitar, vocals, synth; Lee J. Malcolm: guitar, vocals, drums, laptop, reverb, synthesiser; Peter Wright: guitar, vocals, keyboards, bass.
WHITE FIELDS AND OPEN DEVICES: Altered Beast, A Hundred Times In Every Direction, Happy Accident, An Idle Brain and the Devil's Workshop, Walking Through Walls, Trois Heures, Look at the Cloud!, Yuki, Two Words and a Gesture, Wave Those Arms, Airmen.
On this début album, produced at the Pachyderm Studio in Minnesota by John Congleton, ten magnificent tracks capture the monomaniac pursuit of the huge dreams and desires of five teenage rock and roll fans who are now moving furiously through their 20s with no intention whatever of slowing down or letting this thing rest where they are. I suppose I could be their Dad - lending them my STEVE HILLAGE, SOFT MACHINE, LED ZEPPELIN and KING CRIMSON vinyl, muttering about "real progressive music". But they are way ahead of me. All that serious-minded unstoppable enthusiasm of the early 70s has been subsumed and noted. So too the revolutions of KRAFTWERK, TORTOISE and US postrock/mathrock. So too the softer sides of freak-folk and the long long echoes of European classical music. They don't really care where it's from or what you might call it - this recording expresses, and stimulates, a hungry interest in the scale and joy of what contemporary popular music can do without getting stuck in the one-way lift of "art". And you can also be sure that they are building on music that neither you, nor I, gentle reader, have even heard of. They sound like a band that know their stuff and don't need telling.
"White Fields And Open Devices" (fabulous though it does sound) isn't stranded out there on its own, exhausted from it's own sprint into the wastes of extreme creativity. It's in with the excitable leading pack, hurtling along at a global pace, and ready to give enormous pleasure to anyone who has been excited by LIFT TO EXPERIENCE, APPLESSEED CAST, MARS VOLTA, MOGWAI, TORTOISE, DON CABALLERO or any of a hundred bands who have looked at what rock can already do and had a crack at doubling it. The threat is that if they don't explode en route a second album will be even more exciting. Make sure you buy this one. These boys need feeding.
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The album has totally new pieces and pieces that were new in 2005 or 2006 but which are now transformed. "Altered Beast" makes its point at track one. Those who have enjoyed their earlier releases and performances of "Beast" will have the delight of recognition and the excitement of a new arrangement and much much richer recording. So too with other familiar titles. The opening piano of "Yuki" (For a tiny example) has a distinctive opening piano phrase (the kind you might spend some hours learning to play yourself to impress friends). On the new album the piano tone is so much better, so much bigger and more real. The idea is suddenly reverberating, subtle music- not just a decent marker saying "piano here".
Listening through the full 60 minutes is an overwhelming experience. There are plenty of landmarks and handrails - big riffs, thunderous climaxes and haunting tunes - but the complexity and the torrent of incident give me the feel of being torn along by rapids in an isolated mountainous region - too dangerous to stop, too scary to go on. When you get your balance, of course there's loads of fun to be had trying to follow tempo changes and cross-cutting time signatures (Are you dancin' there, boy, or are your marchin'?" "Both, Sir", you might mutter as the tune flings itself round another bend in the river and sweeps up screes of electronic glitching, buckets of white water or phials of sampled radio voices strewn assuredly across the racing scenery, glinting in the rainbows of light from the face-stinging spray.
As a five-piece band they blend together like a single mind. They are all prodigious players and swap instruments and roles at will. Their trademark is titanic volume, but their genius is making it theirs and letting it be part of the music. Any idiot can turn up the wick, It takes a lot more thought to have the volume make a real impression at crucial moments and to keep the musical idea flowing while it roars.
Turn this CD up to the loudest you can get without triggering an anti-social behaviour order and notice how very quiet the introduction to "Altered Beast" is. Steady yourself though - it does change in ways that BBC broadcasts cannot reproduce. So do try to see them at a festival this summer - the live thing can be truly therapeutic.
www.vesselsband.com
www.myspace.com/vesselsband
www.cuckundoorecords.com
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