Sometimes, a title just grabs you. Ok, so I'm speaking for myself here, but I can't be alone in experiencing this. Like 'The Brutality of Fact' and 'The Futility of Ignorance,' so 'The Disaster of Imagination' is a title that conjures images and creates expectations. So I'm willing this album to blow me away rather than just be a load of pretentious toss, although even if it doesn't impress, it's still a great title.
Remarkably, Sense of Scenery fulfil and even exceed all of my expectations. Strangely, I find it rather difficult to justify or explain exactly how or why. It isn't as if this is a particularly well produced album, for a start. But perhaps that's why I like it. It takes me back to a time before the Internet when I might buy a record completely on a whim because the artwork or the title caught my attention and looked interesting. Discovering bands without recommendations from others, and without first having read about them or even knowing a single thing about the creators of the music, there was mystery, and nothing to interact with but the music.
So it is with Sense of Scenery. I don't want to know. 'The Disaster of Imagination' is, in spirit, a low-budget post-punk album with analogue production values and new wave (and dare I say it, goth) influenced picked guitar lines. There's a prevalence of metronomic marching drum patterns. The vocals are a pitched around a forced, stretched baritone and not always on note, but it doesn't matter: the anguished lyrics are delivered with expression and emphasis, which often counts for as much if not more than musicality, at least in my book.
Indeed, dissonance is a key element in the formation of atmosphere across 'The Disaster of Imagination', as is evidenced amply on 'Atlantic Pacifics', where the bass, guitar and synths that creep like dry ice over Sean Douglas, tested vocal and pull in different directions to create a disorientating, dark soundscape. Tense and sparse, this album could be twenty, twenty-five years old, and if it was, would be a lost classic.
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There,s more than a hint of Joy Division about ,Daylight TV', (appropriating fleeting as it does moments of melody from 'These Days') but it's no polished for the new millennium Editors-style take on the blueprint. It’s as bleak as hell, and it's breathtaking in its stark spatial sonic creation. There are other 'spot the similarity' moments: 'Bird / Eye / View' nabs snippets of vocal and guitar melody from Police's 'Invisible Sun', for instance. Meanwhile, there are numerous elements reminiscent of 'Beaster'-era Sugar. None of this matters one jot. This album has spirit.
As a rule, I always endeavour to review objectively, and will give credit to music that doesn't necessarily appeal to my tastes based on merit and what I consider to be the general appeal of a release. I've no idea who else this might appeal to, but hell, I love this album.
www.myspace.com/senseofscenery
www.senseofscenery.com
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