Kicks Like Lemuel

Can't be bothered to write anything much here today. I feel crappy, & pretty much nobody reads this site anyway, so let's all conserve our energies.

THE GULLIVERS – AMBULANCE EP

Staring from the window whilst this EP was playing, we witnessed the pretty unwholesome Great British winter, a storm lashing away against the panes, and it seemed as good a time as any to talk about bad weather imagery in the history of pop. Hard rock can barely move for storm images, from the mighty Lightning Bolt to “heavy metal thunder”, but how about breakcore as the sonic equivalent of hailstones? Or acoustic singer songwriters as an annoying drizzle – any takers? And by that logic, The Gullivers’ latest offering, released today, is rather wonderfully akin to being lost in an eerie fog.

Which isn’t something we thought we’d be writing, frankly, when we heard their first demo, a snotty yet slightly spineless sliver of short trousered punk, which was amusing enough, but hardly on nodding terms with concepts such as subtlety or melancholy, yet the Ambulance EP boasts more in common with the glacial soundscapes of The Workhouse than it does the loud and rude affront of Headcount. Drums are slow and deliberately unemotive, the bass plods a defeated march, and guitars are suspended in cold reverb. Within this sonically misty dream landscape wander Mark Byrne’s vocals like a shelled shocked warrior, covered in contusions and abrasions, drenched in world weariness. Interestingly the vague but allusive lyrics keep referring to moments of crisis – “alarm bells ring”, “the ceiling caves in on us” – but this record is the sound of quiet resignation, not spasming panic, and this paradox is what makes The Gullivers such an excellent local act.

OK, there are a few minor quibbles. The rhythm playing is occasionally fractionally sloppy, especially in “Neptune”’s tempo changes (and it’s so much easier to spot when playing music of this restraint and delicacy, rather than the hell for leather punk racket of old); the Joy Division keyboards at the end of said tune are a tiny bit unoriginal; and the backwards coda after “Silhouette” is just plain hackneyed. Also, although the performances on this recording exude studied melancholia, sometimes in the live arena Byrne’s vocals simply sound messy, but none of this matters when we can float in the icy stasis of the title track, and lose ourselves in its spectral doom. We’d be going too far to claim that The Gullivers are the new wave version of Burial, whose music reduces rave to a barely present wraith, but there is a similarity in the way they take exuberant, perhaps even dumb, music and distill from it a ghostly sadness. With this record The Gullivers have graduated from “good, for Bicester” to “good for the soul”. Long may their winter last.