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."
