In the beginning (the beginning of what, I’m not entirely sure) there were
just two lo-fi electronica Indie bands. The Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev shared their castle between them, and lived in harmony writing “beautiful” and ambiguous songs for NME readers to dance to. Then, one day, there came a knock at the castle gates.
Suddenly there were three.
Half of The Earlies are from the North West of England, the other half from Texas. If Liam Gallagher had sex with… well… George Bush, and they had a child, it would be named The Earlies. I imagine that they started off as a blend between the psychedelic sun drenched passion of the open plains of southern America, crossed with the down-to-earth realism of Fishergate Shopping centre in Preston. However, listening to their debut album “These were the Earlies”, it’s pretty clear that they have banished any influences from the North West to some nearby woodland where the Nine Black Alps will stumble across them after a night of heavy drinking.
The songs on “These were the Earlies” seem to follow a pattern. They start off rather constrained, soft and peppered with piano plonks and snatches of lyrical philosophical niceties. Then, usually about two minutes in, they go completely Kafka. In the case of “One of us is Dead”, this involves a descent into a woozy haze of half sustained synth riffs and snatches of recordings of religious sermons, its what I imagine stumbling into a Pentecostal church service in Los Vegas after drinking three quarters of a bottle of vodka would sound like. After about three and a half minutes of “Wayward Son”, the song dissolves like a paracetemol tablet in lukewarm water, leaving a scattered polyphonic texture, like the mating call of twenty or so expensive Casio keyboards left out in the desert on a winters night.
For some reason there is no such thing as a perfect Flaming Lips album. So, following the trail blazed by this band, there are a few songs, two in fact, that let the side down on “These were the Earlies”. “Song for #3” and “Lows” are a little bit too fuzzy, and lacking substance, the kind of song that would be filler on one of the lesser known Mercury Rev albums. (It’s those two bands again, the two missing links between Idlewild and New Order).
“Morning Wonder” however, more than redeems these two tracks. It opens with what can perhaps only be described as the world’s first electronica rockabilly riff. Imagine the ministry of sound being invaded by lost relatives of the Kings of Leon. The song then builds into a series of carefully timed slow-motion sonic explosions that blossom outwards then shrivel away again in a matter of maybe thirty of forty seconds.
In short, if you take, say, “Definitely Maybe” by Oasis, and “Drukqs” by Aphex Twin and put them at either end of a spectrum (of some sort). Then placed every single album ever made on this spectrum according how much or how little they sounded like these two albums, then (alongside of course the lips and rev) The Earlies would be pacing up and down with a voice recorder somewhere near the middle, preparing sound samples for their next album.
