THE SHAKER HEIGHTS – BRUNSKI (Skag Harry Records)
It’s almost exactly four years since The Shaker Heights
released anything. You remember them,
right? You’ll know you’re remembering
them correctly if you can barely remember anything at all, such was the
harmlessness of their light rock, filling gaps in midweek line-ups anonymously
and efficiently like packing crate polystyrene nuggets. And after all this time, has anything
changed? Bloody right it has! This
single is pretty damned great.
Apparently, “Brunski” was inspired by Kafka and explores “the pressure
of non-arrival”, which sounds like nonsense and justifies a certain piece of
Wheatsheaf gents’ graffiti we shan’t reproduce here, but this is the only
negative thing we can say. “Brunski”
opens with a coldly insistent drum machine goosestep, which is soon joined by
skeletal fret-buzzing bass whilst some snide cyborg synth lines look askance
from the shadows. Into this freeze-dried
goth diorama drift Robyn Cooper’s sad-eyed vocals, before the whole thing is
lifted to a warmer place by a chorus recalling Tears For Fears. It lasts brief seconds though, before we’re
back in step with the melancholy march.
This is chilly music to turn a collar up against, bleak pop to make you
blow onto your hands.
The B side, “Sick And Weird” is a simpler acoustic ditty
made special by the gaunt hollowness of the keyboards, sickly sonic mistrals
blowing through the melody. It’s like
they took the sparsest track on Prefab Sprout’s Protest Songs and made it five times more miserable, without losing
the prettiness of Cooper’s voice. Nightshift spends a lot of time telling
grown-up bands to stop being so sensible, get blitzed and try to capture some
childish magic, but if The Shaker heights are anything to go by, take time
out. Have kids. Get a mortgage. Become a quantity surveyor. Do anything, basically, if it improves your
music this much.
