The Spring And The Book

Trying to write something interesting here, but it's hard, because I'm listening to an LP of poetry that my friend found on the street.  It's quite good.  Thom Gunn's full of crap, though, isn't he?

SPRING OFFENSIVE/ COUNT DRACHMA/ ALL WE ARE, St Barnabas Church, 14/6/12

The priest at St Barnabas gets a birthday cards made from cereal boxes.  Not the sort of thing we find out at most gigs, but the parish magazine keeps us diverted in St Barnabas’ whilst we wait for Liverpool’s All We Are to locate the venue.  Ironically for a band who aren’t on time, they’re painfully “now”, laying well brought up Beach Boys vocal lines over quietly malleted toms and light guitar noise in an introverted indie style, like Fleet Foxes having a go at being Sigur Ros, or a grown up version of Fixers at a farmers' market sipping carrot juice, instead of a heady cocktail of LSD and reverb.   All We Are’s sound fits a beautiful church; it’s not just their sepulchral elegance, but because all these smiles and handclaps make them look like trendy 80s vicars.

Count Drachma, a Stornoway spin off, present their take on traditional Zulu songs.  The fiddle licks and excellent cajon rhythms give the set a swinging zydeco air, whilst the vocal lines have the apparently effortless waft of much great folk music.  Perhaps the band could do with more bite, and the vocals more authority, but for a recently formed, extra-curricular outfit, it’s rather good.  In fact, it’s precisely rather good, and probably not destined to set anyone aflame.

Unlike Spring Offensive, whose music is as heart-wrangling and emotionally wrought as it is possible for pop music to be.  Always an excellent band, in the past our criticism has been that they push their climaxes too hard, forcing their songs to one more crescendo.  But not any more.  Tonight, even in older songs, each sonic pinnacle is entirely earned, each huge chorus blossoming naturally.  Part of this is down to the guitar parts, which now seem to owe more to Stars Of The Lid or Mogwai than Youthmovies, slowly burning then crashing in fizzing waves.  The drums, too, have a haunted clockwork eeriness where once they thumped a bold tattoo. If evidence were needed that this is a band at the height of their powers, check the arrangements, subtle alterations to the songs that use the natural reverb of the church to magnify every facet. 

A band of vision and hard graft, Spring Offensive look as though they can achieve anything after tonight’s celebration of beautifully controlled, twitchy romanticism.  There are light boxes everywhere, broadcasting couplets like some Barbara Kruger rip off, but it’s the piles of books on the floor that intrigue us.  We pick one up, and out falls a newspaper clipping from 1825, which we slip into our pocket.  That’s Spring Offensive for you: they make big gestures, but it’s the tiny surprises that you take away with you.