Back in the day, the idea of bands working in any situation where the protagonists couldn’t get together and thrash out songs in their rehearsal room must have seemed unthinkable.
In the self-absorbed 21st Century, though, most of us are seemingly thrust into multi-tasking and the idea of collaborating at a distance is becoming considerably more commonplace. Hell, in the case of The Postal Service, they even named their project after the method they employed to get their songs together and the fact they weren’t sitting in a room throwing riffs at each other for 12 hour spells did little to diminish the impact of the final product.
Indeed, The Postal Service could just as easily have been the name CLAYHILL adopted for their own project as the band’s creative nucleus of vocalist Gavin Clark (Stoke), guitarist Ted Barnes (Kent) and bassist/ keyboard player Ali Friend (London) remain geographically scattered to this day and have been known to resort to posting work tapes as they work on their fantastic songs. If anything, it’s worked in their favour, as their previous releases, the mini-LP “Cuban Green” and debut full-length album “Small Circle” remain gloriously enigmatic things of wonder which continue to satisfy long after the fact.
Second album ‘proper’, “Mine At Last” suggests the distance is still working to Clayhill’s benefit too. Co-produced by Simon Burwell (Damon Albarn’s “Mali Music” project), they’re still recording cracked and gorgeous songs which reek of skewed pastorality. There are a couple of changes, notably that there’s a little less reliance on some of the loops that burrowed beneath the skin of “Small Circle” and that previous drummer Tim Weller has been replaced by Olafur Olafsson, but overall his ability to propel Clayhill’s low-key, yet inherent funkiness marks him out as an admirable replacement.
As with “Small Circle”, “Mine At Last” is no stranger to immediacy in places. Recent single “Halfway Across” is quintessential Clayhill, built around a snaggly Barnes guitar motif, tumbling drums, Friend’s jazzy bass counterpoint and a garrulous, yet naturally melancholic vocal from Clark, culminating in that imploring chorus of “you are the last tree standing/ and I won’t cut you down”, which – especially when taken in context with some of the album’s other lyrics – has a religious, rather than Eco-friendly resonance.
Elsewhere, songs like “Fortress” and “Suffer Not” again represent Clayhill at their most robust and accessible. The former has cellos standing by, finds Olafur and Ali getting rhythmically jiggy and ultimately sounds a little like a distant relative of “Cuban Green”s great “Figure Of Eight” while “Suffer Not” flirts with a fuzztone emblem, rocks surprisingly hard and features several magnificent lyrical couplets from Gavin, such as “The brave are gonna sew our wounds/ the saints are gonna seal our tongues with wax”. Wow. “Buy Me A Suit”, meanwhile, is Clayhill at their most direct and poppy with the chorus’s anthemic aspect suggesting it’ll be as popular live as “Grass cutter” and Ali’s upright bass playing giving them a much more supple backbone than most contemporary English bands out there.
|
Perhaps inevitably, though, it’s when they slow it down and wheel out the intimacy that Clayhill really score. Opener “Beard” is frail as you like with acoustic guitars and tinkly glockenspiels and finds a childlike Gavin emoting “I’m glad that I suffered with you/ I’m glad that I stayed”; “One Nerve” again recalls the dog-eared pastorality of “Cuban Green” with its’ lazily funky backbeat and Ali’s bassline snaking around the melody and the broody and melancholic “Hector’s Laugh” hints at both early Tindersticks and the best spy themes as it gradually unwraps its’ cloak of mystery.
As was the case with both “Small Circle” and “Cuban Green”, there’s nary a duff moment within earshot, though the fragile minimalism of both “Hang On” and the closing “After The Slaughter” are undeniably special. The latter, especially, is still and hymnal, with one of Gavin’s most emotive vocals to date taking centre stage and the song’s elusive atmosphere quietly recalling Talk Talk’s magnificent “Laughing Stock.”
Clayhill, of course, will never be a quick-fix pop band with their faces splashed across the front of the style mags that supposedly represent the ‘kids’ these days, but then that was never the point. They remain one of our best home-grown talents and “Mine At Last” is again an object of desire that will reciprocate all the love and affection you invest in it.
|
