Review Summary: Put on those dancing boots, I'm gonna tear this place up out at the roots
Sat in a ramshackle rental van, not even half-way up the UK’s y-axis, I locked onto a fixed point on the horizon of the A1 motorway and, in vain, tried to enter a period of hibernation. We were carting that flimsy metal chamber on a 1200 mile round-trip up and down the country, myself as a passenger/mule, to haul a load of furniture and boxes of junk into its carcass and relocate them to point A. Point B was Elgin, Scotland, a place that in my short stay presented itself as charmingly miserable. In that respect it was unfortunately a home away from home, and that much meant that the closest thing to a reward came in the form of a bacon sandwich forced down our gullets by a lonely neighbour.
There wasn’t much that could have justified that agonising journey - the monotony of the grey asphalt and the grey skies and the grey hills numbing my corneas til I forgot what colour was - but I think it was that gloom, that impenetrable and classically British washout, which helped me gain a real appreciation for The Longcut. As we stone-faced men ambled up-country with only our own bad conversation as company, the Mancunian experimenters injected the black and white with the flushed red of their nosedive noise-making.
Call it a happy accident born of circumstance, but there was a rich and satisfying dichotomy of the colourless mundanity of the repeating landscape and the angst-laden backlash it fed. The engorged guitars, violent cymbal smashing and yelped vocals nearly void of melody seemed as distant from the surroundings as was imaginable, yet all those acrid tones were linking arms in direct defiance against it. It was a significant combatant of all the sights I’d quickly grown to loathe, and it helped to while away the slowed passage of time, helped me to tune out and detach myself from the journey. To me, it was just an extended onslaught of noise. It challenged me and my formulaic listening habits, but it followed the rules enough for me to not be completely alienated. And I appreciated it a lot, in that bubble, but I didn't want to revisit the band afterwards. In my mind, they’d retired themselves as part of my library with that journey.
I’ve since come to understand more about why we gelled. Open Hearts is the faults of man and the weight of regret compacted into muddy absolution. It’s the sighed resigned given a platform to be bold, each grizzled tremolo and each booming drum taking with them a morsel of burden as they plunge into the depths. There is flagrant distortion and pedal abuse in play, but each track is so rewarding in its ability to build and surprise and emote. 'Something Inside' begins with an unappetising vocal drawl, but it becomes bolstered by a constricting mesh of dark piano, throaty bass, and a rigid electronic beat, and saves a sonic lashing for its unexpected fourth act. Later, 'Mary Bloody Sunshine' begins pretty by comparison. It houses those familiar layers, but instead of jamming them together, they grow and weave like a plant stem around a stick in the soil. And it can't help but continue to fill the entire space it resides in, til its mass dictates an all-out landslide.
And hidden underneath this unnavigable seaweed jungle and the wreckage of that ramshackle rental van, beyond the rampant anxiety and repetition that The Longcut build their music on, there are glimpses of modesty and humanity. In its apologetic title track dwells the earnest lyric “I won't forget that look you gave me when we heard that gentle beat and linked our hands out on the floor”, and in closer 'The Last Ones Here', Stuart Ogilvie is at his barest: "When I die, I wish to see through my lover's eyes, and hear the thoughts that she is thinking, to breathe the air she breathes and feel her beating heart, and take the sadness from her life". You get the impression that the towers of sound are really just two-way mirrors for the members to stand behind.
Each listen grips by way of pumping pistons and the magnetism of sheer clatter, these rousing anthems for the disenchanted moulded from crimson climax, but the infusion of modest and covered messages are what ultimately won my weathered heart. They marry the two so well, and now that I’m able to take a step back and appreciate the fact, I don’t require the dismal British landscape as fodder (although I dare say it would still be superlatively fitting). These days, I’ll recall them through other means - every time I emit a sighed growl, muscle memory dictates that I lead into the bassline that sees in the album. I think I’d even consider making that miserable trip once more, to experience again that sensation of supreme detachment from Great British malaise.
