Having seen them live a few times now, I have to admit to rather liking Wintermute. While there’s been no shortage of Gang of Four inspired, choppy guitar bands in recent years, particularly since Franz Ferdinand came onto the scene, I consider Wintermute to be something of a cut above the rest.
In some senses, this is more of a compilation than an album proper, featuring as it does all six tracks from the aborted ‘Fun With Wizard Stencils’ EP plus the band’s debut single and attendant B-side and a track that’s previously featured on a compilation (The Fall of Hans Gruber), with only 3 tracks truly new to the release. But such complaints would be churlish, and it’s straight to business with the angular pop blast of ‘Bad Company in a Sauna,’ just the first in a track-listing composed of quirky and largely irrelevant titles. ‘Bad Company’ bubbles along with noodly intertwining guitar motifs and hits immediately with a hook before veering off in another direction altogether. And it pretty much sets the blueprint for the rest of the songs on here.
Singles ‘Gambling or Playing cards’ and ‘Dead or Not He Was Wearing Sunglasses’ are both clear standouts, and combine melody with shoutalong choruses and some niggling, nagging guitars underpinned by some tight rhythms that perform somersaults with time signatures. It’s post-punk edged math-rock with a pop sensibility and some occasionally fraught and desperate-sounding vocals, and somehow it works.
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Wintermute are a band who aren’t afraid to play in the spaces between the stuttering guitars and rhythms, and these studio versions of songs that have been allowed to develop live demonstrate this amply, while also retaining much of the band’s live energy. That said, the production, while clean and bright in a way that’s well-suited to the songs, is, on occasion. a little thin-sounding.
Such niggles aside, there are some cracking tunes here: ‘I Abandoned My Boy’ (without the parenthetical ‘Hello Nuts’ that appeared on the unreleased EP) is an emotively-tinged echotastic slower-paced number, while ‘Emerald Hill’ begins as a noddlesomely proggy number before metamorphasising into a driving stomper with more than just a nod to Gang of Four’s ‘Glass,’ and ‘Jambon! Jambon!’ is a frenetically-paced race to the end and the perfect closer to an album that would just about fit onto one side of a C90.
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