My Hood (3)

Only one review to complete our three part trip down memory avenue, but it's a long one, of two comps that came out on Misplaced Music. Indeed, a onetime member of Hood popped up on our messageboard at the time to describe the descriptions below as "worringly" in-depth, which was probably the right adverb. What it does do though, is set out my fairly undying affection for the band in minute detail, and make crystal how we'd obsessed over so many Adams Brothers incarnations over the years. It also returns to a theme we haven't given up on yet, my unrepentant fetishisation of both obscure 7"s and the thrill of the(ir) chase.

"hood "singles compiled" (misplaced music): hood "compilations 1995-2002" (misplaced music)

"sometimes your arms... are like a weight around my neck"

on one of the early hood releases that we plucked from a cobwebbed existence in a local indie store's 7" rack a half-decade ago, a good old-fashioned paper insert noted wryly, "there's plenty more where this came from". as we well know now, that wasn't the half of it. but then again, wetherby's most adaptable combo have fashioned a career (of sorts) from understatement in all its forms. while we lament once more the lack of pylons on the sleeves of these timely reissues (the band choosing to spurn the traditional telegraph poles and wire stacks, leaving these two rekkids bedecked only in images of northern fields blinking in early-day sunlight) everything else about "singles compiled" and "compilations", from the unassuming typewriter track list to the comforting chunky band logo, is 100% authentik h-o-o-d: the real thing, the hood that this website remains obsessed with. what more could a boy or a girl need than two new compilations showcasing three more glorious hours of hood's sonic fumblings over 79 (listen to 'em) trax ? don't answer - it's a rhetorical question.

so let's tuck in to the banquet properly, picking from the feast of thought-fragments that constitute blissful mid-period hood, "singles compiled" first. the chinstroking arrivistes who have only just latched onto west yorkshire's finest rustic-altpop quartet (on the merely trifling grounds that "cold house" happens to be potentially a landmark english "rock" album) will be maxi-flummoxed. cd1 especially will send these fairweathers scurrying back to their post-rock primers - it is rough and tumble not very-fi of some class as a host of demos and 4-track segments collide drunkenly, reversing into each other constantly like the time we went down the fair at la condamine and blew 200F on an insane number of jetons for the dodgems. if you're not going to like this album you will know within seconds of the opening "a harbour of thoughts" as a no-fi hidden vocal cowers behind an epileptic strum but pours out as much tangible human emotion as one should ever need. in and around the scuffed, self-conscious half-songs there are still a few palpable steps forward towards the modern all-conquering, genre-straddling hood - the title track of the 555 ep "(the) weight" nicely hid a charming pop song inamongst a stop-start, glitch-influenced arrhythm, and its companion piece "impossible calm" suggests in its fifty-odd seconds the electronic direction that the band would move to in places on future albums.

"i swear i'll finish the bottle / i'll stumble outside..."

tasty morsels like "biochemistry revision can wait", "forehead" and "dismissed army brought us knives" between them sum up every teenage feeling we ever had: and the first "accessible" a-side ("i've forgotten how to live", which got compared to the wedding present by the papers of the day) is included too, together with its preview in rougher form on the "lee faust's million piece orchestra" ep (oh, if only reissues could translate the joy of buying a record whose sleeve was a scrap of photocopied paper pritt-sticked on to a brown paper bag). meanwhile, pristine tunes like "clues to our past and future existence" profit from an outing on digital simply because their pressing plant-challenging use of quiet / loud dynamics asked an awful lot of the 7" format [having said that, this cd has been mastered from vinyl, so perhaps the problem was really our pre-jurassic hardware]. then there's "the year of occasional lull", a whispered near-instrumental single that shepherded them yet more forcefully into the promised land of indie-dub, like "(the) weight" revisited in mellower climes - and do you remember the single "filmed initiative", every copy of which came with its own photograph, still so fresh from prontaprint that you could still smudge it with your icky fingers ? well it's here in full effect too. (it is probably redundant to point out that our copy has a photograph of the sun breaking over a few telegraph poles...)

"singles compiled" also documents how in longer, spaced-out songs like "as evening changed the day" (the b side and alter-ego of "filmed initiative", later remixed for a 555 compilation) hood laid down, as we may have mentioned before, a prototype for much of what came later, including the songs that made up the spine of "cold house". on "i know what to squander" we also hear an early use of the single-note violin sound that crops up on their later albums. and this double-cd set is finished off with no less than 15 unreleaseds (yaay!), many of which are as good as their back catalogue: take "innocence of brittle days" whose focus is "to rid myself of the city" (reprising the "oh how the city gets me down" sentiment of "70s manual worker") or the halkyn-like fragility of "leaves across the road". and in all of these songs there is also a real mindset that only exceptionally is there any need to go too far above the one-minute mark: so even though on their two lower-fi albums "cabled linear traction" and "silent 88" there were plenty of strong 3 or 4 minute indie guitar tunes ("british radars", "the field is cut") inamidst the short songs, here we are very much in the realm of minimalism. witness "crow blown west" (almost a single, repeated thought, "i don't know why i bother with you") à la "silent 88"'s "i hate you now". it seems very adolescent but for that, all the more affecting.

inevitably and despite all the joys packed in, things are still frustratingly incomplete - we accept that the canadian label happy-go-lucky's "structured disasters" cd homed in on the "sirens" and "opening into enclosure: a disused post-mill" eps and some choice out-takes, so those omissions are justifiable (even though, by the same token, a clutch of those tracks reappear here). but then the definitive version of "silo crash" (from the "harbour of thoughts" ep) is missing, while "i've forgotten how to live"'s dramatic flipside "dimensions t.b.a." is wrongly reduced, apparently at the band's insistence rather than just for time purposes: in its full form, it was a wonderful song, 3/4 of which was down to the magical, haphazard, intro that starts with random single notes and works up imperfectly but imperiously to emotional implosion - the edit here gives us the implosion but excises the intro, and thus sacrifices so much of the power of the song. it's perhaps also a shame, although we're confident it will be addressed at some future date, that their debut 7" for domino recordings, "useless" isn't exhumed, as it was a top shambler, perhaps this time vaguely justifying wedding present comparisons with warm-guitar sincerity, and far removed from the ambient patterns of album "rustic houses, forlorn valleys" that soon followed it and emphasised their versatility.

and then there's "compilations (1995-2002)". this has a little bit more variation overall - it's a free-range curate's egg in which, par exemple, "sound the cliché klaxons" is simply a beautiful should-have-been single despite its jokey title, "i have it in my heart to jump into the ocean" is one of those many sublime variations on "as evening changed the day", "a shot across the bow" with its church organ and dub echo is a sinking companion for squarepusher's "our underwater torch", and "cross the land" is just one of those brilliant tracks that starts as a moving, heartbreaking soliloquoy but eventually transmutes into the sound of a grand piano being pushed down the stairs while meat whiplash tune up on the adjacent balcony.

all those good old recurring hood lyrical themes are here - memories of childhood, deep insecurity, the passing of time (or as they would later have it, "the cycle of days and seasons") - and they were never without some self-mocking humour, either - a.c. would be proud of titles like "we'll never live up to the first l.p." (a tongue-in-cheek j&mc tribute ? the backing is "just like honey" and there's a hell of a lot of feedback, man), "rocck ? i can't even spell the word" (a slurred rehash of "disappointed" from the "harbour of thoughts" ep) or "killing the band" (knee deep in the realm of ambienteca, but a reference to prolapse, presumably, unless we are rather overestimating prolapse's importance in the scheme of things).

these records sum up the appeal to many of us of "indie" music and what it really is. there's not a song here that isn't warm, honest and refreshing and the fact that many of the earlier songs could have been recorded by any bright, earnest teenagers on to a 2-track is neither here nor there. yeah, the tunesmiths will listen to the frailer stuff and say "oh, anyone could do that" (as if that was actually a reason for not liking something, and the thought hadn't occurred to them that if they were that bothered they could ac.tually have located the courage of their convictions and gone out and done it themselves), but the reality is that most labels that hood recorded for (and there are approx 6000) will never have released anything better."

My Hood (2)

What followed the records mentioned in the last post was pretty amazing. It was "Cold House".

"first thing is that although this album was described by splendid e-zine as being "as subtle as a former subtlety lecturer and head of the Subtlety Department at Oxford University that has left the subtle world of academic subtlety for a lucrative career in private-sector subtlety" it is in fact much more commercially accessible than more or less any of their previous works consisting as they did either of sub-weddoes lo-fi indie mixed with white noise and spoken words or piano or junglist excerpts ("cabled linear traction" and "silent 88") or neo-classical swathes of flute, clarinet and guitar ("rustic houses, forlorn valleys" and "the cycle of days and seasons"). after all, this time there are a round 10 tracks; no instrumentals; no odd interludes between songs; no sub-one minute or supra-ten minute numbers. commer-cial!

and notwithstanding that virtually all the songs here are, at least when stripped down, 'standard' hood compositions (rustic indie pop with a little bit of depth - oh, and violins - exemplified by the perfect a-side "home is where it hurts" earlier this year) "cold house" is still an astonishing album. for the reasons below.

first track "they removed all trace that anything had happened here", a lament(possibly) for a lost way of life, builds as carefully as any other hood morsel, and really takes off when the quick fire rap checks-in. it is followed by the immaculate "you show no emotion at all ", a remote viewer-style arsenal of clicks which slowly builds into a more traditional guitar construct, the words washing over ("will we survive ? i know we will"). really modern and really effective. judging by the lyrics, i think that "branches bare" is the pseudo-title track; this time driven by a huge loop of bass, it again comes into its own when the rapping, this time a slow mantra, picks up the slack and starts to echo low in the mix. "the winter hit hard", underpinned by crackle, builds from a murmur and as claire pointed out (after 3 glasses of red), it's an almost doorsy kind of thing - drums and bass refracting upwards into a musical storm.

"i can't find my brittle youth" is the intro to side two - a straightforward-ish indie tune, beefed up from the version on the otherwise ropey "jonathon whiskey" compilation cd and ending in a haze of percussion so dense it almost sounds like a shoot-out. but suddenly, in "this is what we do to sell out(s)" the beatz are strictly minimalist - that warp/skam thing, almost - before, again, the vocals and guitars pull everything together without ever losing that nervy, tense feel as the breaks edge around the mix. "lines low to frozen ground" is another fantastic number, again strongly in the vein of past pastoral mini-epics like "as the evening changed the day", a pivotal hood moment in which so many of their melodies were distilled. and to close, "you're worth the whole world" in which the fantastic vocal interplay of the singer and the narrator strikes the mood. a fine closer.

as i think other reviews of "cold house" have noted, the most extraordinary thing about this album is that while describing it makes it seem almost avant-garde, listening to it, it just sounds controlled and natural, avoiding the usual traps of cross-genre pollination whereby you kind of wish the band had stuck to what they're good at. because what hood are good at is generic, organic development, and studio album no. 5 (i don't think we can even start to count the various eps, etc) is another step closer to greatness. in the past, the more conventional guitar-driven songs like "i've forgotten how to live" and "her innocent stock of words" were amongst my favourite hood songs - now, i'm learning to prefer their bolder, darker textures."

There had then followed a clumsy attempt to compare and contrast Hood with Radiohead - my heart was in the right place, but the prose wasn't. The point that still stands though is that Hood should have been more feted.

When they were picked up though - with interest from the BBC setting up a gig at Hackney Ocean on 17 January 2001 - we were, of course, horrified, curse us. Ain't no pleasing us, then (more on that theme later).

"we still don't regard hood as post-rock: we are faintly bemused that the esteemed radio 3 can select them to headline a left-field evening at the ocean, thus securing an audience of painfully earnest and trendy fashion-conscious types with bright new designer labels and laboriously-gelled "scruffy" hair who would have been equally at home in the dispiritingly trendy bar beside hackney central which on our arrival in e8 we found to our horror had usurped the rough charm of the former lord amhurst pub.

because hood, in our eyes, are a fine indie guitar band, albeit one with incredible range and versatility. to lump them in with the space-rock types who have helped cram the proverbial emperor's wardrobe to saturation with new clothes is so unfair - who else in that scene can have produced songs as feral and fearless as hood classics like "the field is cut" or the exploratory "dimensions t.b.a." ?

when we saw hood the first time, it was at the bristol louisiana, wedged on a bill between a visceral third eye foundation and the rather more dulcet movietone. in the tiny upstairs room, hood had stumbled through a 25 minute set of tuning up, exchanging instruments and occasionally embarking on unrecognisable song structures before everything just fell apart. tonight, apart from still looking so young, and a few exchanges of instrument between personnel, hood were displaying their new found maturity, calmly despatching selections from their new album "cold house", which we may just have mentioned before. although the five songs, starting with the album's first track "they removed all trace that anything had ever happened here" represented all too short an opportunity to bathe in the luxurious melange of indie (yes, say it loud and proud) guitar and vocals, throbbing dub-influenced sequencer and bass, and, in the flesh, frenetic and immaculate live drumming.

we also see (and hear and feel) the bulbous "it's been a long time since i was last here", from the "home is where it hurts" ep: a huge booming bass sound seemingly coming from nowhere as richard adams stands motionless to the left of the stage, before his own electric bass is called into service to bolster the instrumental mist; and "lines low to frozen ground", another soundtrack to early morning dew and low-lying fog over desolate moors. it's pop as thomas hardy.

however, our highlights tonight were "you show no emotion at all" (the repetitive sequencer motif gently and deliberately diluted by hood's trademark guitar picking) - when chris adams sings, almost in a whisper, "i heard the phone ring / so late at night / i thought someone had died... but your voice was filled with love" it is impossibly heartrending. they also finish with a brilliant version of "you're worth the whole world", also the last song on "cold house": again, it is the vocal which seems to make proceedings complete: although the words are still hard to divine, the singer's voice is edged with fragile emotion.

we will continue to regard hood with no little respect and as of meriting immense importance in the scheme of things. their current f(l)avour (of the month) with journalists notwithstanding. we still think they're wonderful, and there's nothing they can do to change that."