Lux Inferior

Why are people so reluctant to move down the bus? When it's busy, why do we all have to squeeze in by the luggage racks because two feet away there's a guy who just won't budge, no matter how often the driver asks? Why does this sort of stuff anger me so much?

LIND OPTICAL - demo

We recall one hungover Saturday morning, barely focussing on shiny pop telly whilst trying to work out why Napalm Death invited Wagner and Yma Sumac to a jam inside our throbbing skull. This was a few years ago, during the first flush of success for harmless pop piffles S Club 7. With typical incision, the CD:UK interviewer was giving them a grilling. Favourite colour, preferred pet, that sort of thing. The final question was, of course, the biggy: “What does your name mean?”
“Well,” came the frothy answer, “Club means we’re like a club, it’s 7 because there are seven of us, and S is….a letter”.
“Thanks for clearing that up,” says the TV poppet, and now over to-“
At which point we suddenly found the energy to leap from our stupor, level a stern finger at the television and complain, “Oi! They haven’t explained the name one bit, merely defined the words”, which in turn led to a big argument amongst the beer zombies around the living room as to the difference between translating and parsing, which turned out to be a remarkably good headache cure.
Still, S Club were at least more cogent than Lind Optical, who make a point of telling us that their name comes from a 19th Century opera star Jenny Lind and Isaac Newton’s work on the nature of light, which of course tells us exactly bugger all about what the hell their name is supposed to mean.

All of which reminiscing, though doubtless fascinating, is standing in the way of getting down and judging this little three tracker….for the simple reason that it just doesn’t make much of an impression. They’ve certainly got the pedigree, having loaned members to three honest-to-god brilliant local acts (The Evenings, Borderville & Keyboard Choir), as well as vinyl terrorists Lum Col Con Pix and drum ‘n’ bassers Pan Tonic. Which begs the question why the opening track, though pleasant and well constructed, mostly sounds like a puddle of watery faux Beatlisms that’s something like listening to “Sowing The Seeds Of Love” by Tears For Fears through a toy transistor radio. Don’t misunderstand us, this demo all clicks together happily, and the vocals are pleasantly poppy, reminding us of perky and under-rated Oxonians Loopy*, whilst there are some nice keyboard diddles at the back of the mix, but second tune, “Honeycomb”, is a horrible Community Centre psych gospel, and makes us think of The Polyphonic Spree without any, err, spree. All of this critical assassination makes Lind Optical sound much worse than they are; they’re alright but they sadly don’t seem to connect any punches, and may have picked up all their musical ideas from World Of Adequacy.

The final track, “The Red Room”, may be meant as a joke, but is actually the most pleasing piece on offer by a fair old whack, a dramatic wodge of shiny cheap synths with niggling clusters of piano notes and brazen horn blasts sprinkled liberally over the top with a Stravinskian flourish. If you can imagine the incidental music to a mid-80s radio play about The French Revolution, and then abstract it by about 10%, you’re probably imagining “The Red Room”. Smart ideas and – Jesus preserve us – a bit of fun on display here, but at 60 seconds in length, it’s not clear whether Radiophonic Workshop cabaret is what we can expect from these guys in the future, or just more duff distillations of George Harrison album tracks. This is a very promising demo, but as yet Lind Optical have promised a lot and delivered a little.