-=- SHGZ -=- * Shoegaze * Indie * Post-Rock * Grunge * Dream Pop * Psych-Rock * Ethereal * ARTIST..: Hookworms ALBUM...: Microshift GENRE...: Psychedelic Rock STYLE...: Indie Rock, Synth-pop, Electronic YEAR....: 2018 LABEL...: Domino ENCODER.: LAME 3.98.4 -V0 BITRATE.: 243 kbps avg QUALITY.: 44.1kHz / Joint Stereo SOURCE..: CD TRACKS..: 9 SIZE....: 81.72 MB URL..: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookworms_%28band%29 - TRACKLIST 1 Negative Space 6:56 2 Static Resistance 3:48 3 Ullswater 7:08 4 The Soft Season 4:00 5 Opener 8:36 6 Each Time We Pass 5:15 7 Boxing Day 2:18 8 Reunion 2:51 9 Shortcomings 5:40 Total Playtime: 46:32 Expanding your sound without losing your edge is a tough trick to pull off, but Hookworms manage it with inner space to spare. * Feedback and distortion are the training wheels of indie rockùobfuscating agents that provide nervous upstarts with a sense of confidence as they face the public, secure in the knowledge that no one's really going to be able to decipher what the hell they're singing about. On their first two albums, Leeds quintet Hookworms rode those wheels down to the rim, whipping up a psych-punk squall that was heavy on the overdriven drone and extended meltdown fade-outs. You could sense they had an excitable, charismatic frontman in Matt Johnston (a.k.a. MJ), but his blown-out vocals often sounded like they were in competition with the garage-grimed organs and fuzzed-out guitars to see which could push the needle furthest into the red. Still, it didn't really matterùby seamlessly melding that surface scuzz to adrenalized motorik rhythms, Hookworms had forged their own brand of stoner rock for people too wired to get stoned. The band's third album, Microshift, is similarly an exercise in relentless forward motion and joyous abandon. But the means they use to achieve those ends have changed dramatically: Like the reformed partier who now gets their endorphin rush from morning jogs instead of amphetamines, Hookworms have traded in chaos for clarity. The adherence to krautrockin' repetition remains, but the proto-punk engine has been replaced by electronic loops and glacial synths. Suddenly, a band that once sounded most at home in strobe-lit basement dives now sounds primed for a late-afternoon slot at your roving summer festival of choice. It's not just the sonic upgrade that makes Microshift perhaps this year's most ironically titled record. In the absence of the band's once-omnipresent din, we hear lyrics that are as emotionally messy as the music supporting them is precise and pristine. For a long time, in interviews and on his open-book Twitter feed, MJ has been disarmingly frank about his mental health struggles (not to mention the 2015 flood that destroyed his studio and temporarily sidelined the band). But on Microshift, as never before, he grapples with some serious business head-on: death, heartbreak and body image, to name a few. What's most striking is not the candor with which he broaches sensitive subjects, but that he sounds so eager and enthused to slay those dragons. Take the opener, "Negative Space," a song inspired by the passing of a dear friendùbut also one of the most exhilarating, exuberant indie rock songs of 2018 so far, an electro-rock Mt. Olympus whose step-by-step ascent mirrors Sound of Silver, but whose insistent vocals scream Superchunk. And where previous Hookworms songs would be content to hammer a repeated riff into oblivion, "Negative Space" showcases a newfound facility for surprise melodic changes and sublime structural shifts, like when the song's white-knuckled energy peaks partway through and is released through a dreamy disco denouement that suggests closure. Not so: "Negative Space" is merely a warm-up for the mighty seven-minute exorcism that is "Ullswater," where MJ eulogizes a failed relationship atop a bubbly synth-pumped beat, before calmly admitting "I wish I held you tight before" and unleashing all that pent-up regret in a climactic, guitar-charging rock-out that's up to Hookworms' previous paint-peeling standards. As we get deeper into Microshift, it becomes clear that Hookworms' evolution from unruly noisemakers to art-pop sophisticates isn't purely aestheticùit's a rebuke of the male aggression that guitar-based rock'n'roll has traditionally encouraged, and an embrace of greater sensitivity and emotional honesty. This goes beyond the band's first proper ballad, "The Soft Season," an aching post-breakup farewell that suggests Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space as commandeered by Ben Gibbard. On "Opener," MJ doesn't just lament the inability of men to be candid with one another, he summons the song's blissfully buzzing organs and gliding momentum as a way of melting such insecurities away, like an emo Stereolab. And in "Shortcomings," he gives voice to a condition rarely addressed by male performers: insecurity over one's onstage appearance. Because even though punk taught us anyone can do it, that's no protection from deeply ingrained notions of how rock singers should look while they're doing it. "I feel guarded/I feel less than strong," MJ admits. "Here where our bodies don't belong." But as he demonstrates throughout Microshift, anxiety should never get in the way of ecstasyùand as "Shortcomings" rides its psychedelic disco groove into the sunset, he makes good on that promise. * It is always a fascinating moment when an artist steps out from behind a career-long shroud. For Leeds band Hookworms, you can understand why this was the moment. It has been over three years since their last record, a time that has been filled with frustration and tragedy. A North American tour hit the rocks when bureaucratic visa goblins struck and months later the home studio of keyboardist and vocalist Matthew 'MJ' Johnson was flooded, leaving the band out of pocket and inspiration. MJ is one of the country's most sought-after indie producers, so the setback was all the greater. The time out has seen the band transform. Where previous records were doused in feedback and thick layers of noise, Microshift is full of space and sharpness. The comeback single 'Negative Space' is a masterpiece of production: a maximal, DFA-flavoured playland, driven by drums that make it sound like a hand from above is physically pounding the reverb-laden fog of the first two albums out of the system. The air is clear and the sound handcrafted, with MJ's vocals soaring high and true. It is pulsing, kinetic and emotionally expressive, with lyrics that appear to tackle mental health, a subject about which MJ has rarely been so candid in his music. It's far more than a microshift, that's for sure. The recurring line, "I still hear you every time I'm down" is bittersweet as he sings of being forced to live in the negative space, culminating in a howl of "how long's forever?" In some ways, 'Negative Space' isn't too representative, but the signals were there, in particular the bloopy, modular synth intro and the sparkling vocal clarity. The seven-minute 'Ullswater' is the second of three monster tracks that act as the pillars holding 'Microshift' aloft, well clear of most other records that 2018 will produce. Its studio-created sonic palette of electronic sounds is the new default for Hookworms, but it's a discipline that comes apart at the edges near the track's climax, with MJ's screaming, primal crescendo of "I'll always love you/It's the last thing I'll say/I know it's the last thing I'll do/Stay strong". Even longer is the galloping, head-spinning 'Opener', the third centrepiece. "It's hard to find a better world/Where we can count up all the shortcomings/Oppress them until they're hidden/Or just let it all out," is MJ's existential cry this time. For an album burdened with such heavy subject matter, it's remarkable how uplifting a listening experience it is. The latter two tracks are separated by the gorgeous and heartbroken 'The Soft Season', reminiscent of no less a band than Spiritualized, a song whose subject is hiding their desire, only to be betrayed by the expression on their face. It is in every way a million miles from 'Pearl Mystic' or 'The Hum', as is 'Each Time We Pass', which is what an A-Ha song might sound like if it had been left alone in a damp cave to fight for its survival thirty years ago and is just now braving the outside again, blinking in the light, mutated and mangled but still with the same sweetness in its heart. Only once does the painful experience of the studio flood bleed into the record, on 'Boxing Day', named for the day in 2015 when the River Aire's banks broke. Screeching brass and furious guitar stabs litter the track, a self-contained two minute purge of anger. It is twinned with the following track 'Reunion', the calm that followed the storm. One imagines the reunion in question is between band and studio, and accordingly the track is beaming with love. You would have to search far and wide to find a transformation in an already great band that works as well as this. The key to it all is the vulnerability that MJ is now willing to put on display, giving the newfound musical incisiveness the emotional fuel it needs to really fly. If this isn't one of the albums of the year then we must be in for something special. * Artists often have a tendency to make heavy weather out of recording albums. We've all read the features, invariably headlined TO HELL AND BACK, replete with loudly expressed comparisons to "being in the trenches", "on the last helicopter out of Saigon" or to scenes of unimaginable terror and desperation it usually turns out were provoked by taking some drugs, occasionally arguing over the mixing and overrunning their allotted time in the studio. But by anyone's standards, the making of Hookworms' third album was a fraught affair, affected by everything from extreme weather events û their Leeds studio was almost destroyed in a flood û to physical and mental illness: frontman Matthew Johnson has always been open about his struggle with depression. Anyone familiar with Hookworms' previous releases may think they know what to expect musically from Microshift. A band with modest commercial ambitions û the quintet have no management and have declined to give up their day jobs to pursue music full-time û they have nevertheless attracted critical acclaim by honing a dark, fraught, fuzz-drenched sound, equally rooted in the cyclical repetitions of krautrock and Spacemen 3 as the roaring noise of US post-hardcore punk. It has often attracted the label "psychedelic", but if it recalls music from the 60s at all, it isn't the beatific relax-and-float-downstream soundtrack of the Summer of Love, but the more obscure and disturbing stuff that came just before it. Emotionally, at least, their first two albums seemed more in tune with the frenzied, hyper-distorted freakbeat tracks by the Buzz and the Syndicats that Joe Meek produced during his final descent into psychosis. Similarly, the flop singles made by hard-hitting mod bands who responded to LSD not with codified flower-power platitudes, but tumultuous, chaotic music that sounded overwhelmed, even terrified by the experience: the Game's Help Me, Mummy's Gone or the Voice's The Train to Disaster. Given the circumstances of Microshift's creation, more of the same, only more so, seems a given. Advertisement But it isn't. From its opening seconds û when a track called Negative Space kicks into life with a rhythm track influenced by early 80s electro û it becomes clear that Hookworms have done the opposite of what you might reasonably assume. Microshift is a vast and extremely bold sonic leap forward. The thick crust of distortion that coated their earlier releases has been removed, revealing two startling finds previously buried deep within it. Sign up for the Sleeve Notes email: music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras Read more The first is that Johnson, an unwilling frontman apparently so underwhelmed by his own vocal abilities that he went out of his way to conceal them, has a fantastic voice, yearning, open, unaffected and really powerful, capable of delivering a succession of starkly affecting lyrical sucker punches. Frequently hemmed in by his own misery û "I'm feeling awful," he sings on Static Resistance, "I can't last the distance" û he keeps willing himself to go on nonetheless: "Just let it all out, don't fall under," cautions Opener. The second is Hookworms' melodic facility. Easy to miss amid the tumultuous, echoing din of their debut, Pearl Mystic, and its 2014 successor, The Hum, it suddenly finds itself in the spotlight. Opener is a tight, tough pop song underpinned by a Kraftwerk-ish rhythm track that gradually unfurls into a joyous climax; closer Shortcomings has a fabulous chorus; The Soft Season is beautiful in a way that nothing they've recorded before has been: spectral, and spectacular with it. For all the broadening of their sound, not everything has changed. The bass and drums still regularly settle into a forceful, wired, Neu!-like groove, the organ still plays two-chord patterns that recall Suicide by way of Spacemen 3, and something of the ambience of their earlier work hangs over the murky Boxing Day, its monotone vocal interrupted by bursts of noise that sound like samples grabbed at random from a free jazz album. The grasp of dynamics that makes their live shows such powerful, cathartic affairs is still much in evidence: Ullswater's awkward time signature lends a sense of unease to its epic, sweeping sound; songs elide into each other via passages of shimmering synthesizer tones; Negative Space is gradually lost beneath an electronic swirl. Advertisement The world is full of noisy left-field art-rock bands grumpily protesting in interviews that of course they could write pop songs if they wanted to: as it turns out, Hookworms genuinely can. Moreover, they can do it without losing any of the potency or essence of their past work. Microshift manages to be both their most accessible work and their most intense: the sound of an already powerful band gaining not just clarity, but focus. * Hookworms, a West Yorkshire quintet with a name I wouldn't advise looking up on Google Images, is an independent band in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Three albums in, the band still handles its own management and finances, records at singer Matthew 'MJ' Johnson's own studio, and even designs its own artwork in-house. Despite a degree of early success, the members continue to work a variety of day jobs, which no doubt helps them to retain a sense of perspective, freedom and sanity, even if it does limit touring options. Critically, the true independent pioneers recognized the necessity of taking risks. There's not a lot of that going on in the indie-rock sphere right now, but at least Hookworms is swimming against the tide of complacency. Microshift represents a huge step forward for a band that could have probably spent the next decade churning out fuzzy psych-rock records to decent acclaim. Three years of bold artistic evolution are crammed into its nine tracks, with synths playing a dominant role and decipherable vocals exploring highly personal subject matters. It's the kind of major stylistic shift that even the most confident artists likely feel a sense of trepidation about. Microshift isn't a pure pop record by any means, but it's a hell of a lot closer to that realm than Pearl Mystic or The Hum were. It's undeniably more accessible, and for some that might spell bad news, but if you're still fretting about 'credibility' and 'authenticity' in 2018 then you really need to go and get yourself a life. So let's applaud Hookworms, because these independent spirits have not only dared to be different, but they have succeeded emphatically. Indeed, Microshift starts as strongly as any record I've heard this decade, maintaining its sense of adventure for a good thirty minutes or so before finally fading a little in the final third. Even in its more meandering moments, it's never less than interesting; its finest moments, on the other hand, are genuinely exhilarating. The opening salvo of Negative Space and Static Resistance overflows with more ideas than many artists conjure up in their whole careers. The former addresses the loss of the band's friend and live sound engineer, with its melancholic lyrics of longing and loss set over the kind of propulsive disco-infused belter of which James Murphy would be proud. The standout moment for me, however, is Ullswater. It sounds absolutely nothing like my memories of that stunning lake in Cumbria, close to where I grew up, but that is the joy of music, memories, and places - we all interpret and experience things differently. The jarring time signature lends the track a sense of foreboding, which seems at odds with the natural beauty one immediately associates with Ullswater. But it is the lyrics that steal the show, as MJ delicately explores his father's dementia. Towards the climax of the song, he delivers a couplet that packs the emotional heft of a thunderous liver shot: "Oh, one day you'll forget that I'll always love you / It's still the last thing I'll say, I know it's the last thing I'll do." For a vocalist who seemed wary about being heard on previous releases, this strikes me as incredibly bold. And it's quite simply a beautiful tribute. Microshift clearly demonstrates that Hookworms are operating on a new level. The sonic adventure of old persists, but the palette has broadened significantly and is further bolstered by a newfound courage to share experiences, thoughts and feelings. At this point, Hookworms might just be the best British band in the business. For a band defined by its part-time DIY ethos, this is quite the accomplishment. [Believe the Hype] * 'Negative Space', the first single released from 'Microshift' was one of the most brilliantly surprising returns of last year. Placing the band's signature fuzzy kraut aside, the track is a soaring punch of dance-rock that catapults the Leeds five-piece towards the dancefloor, somewhere it seemed inconceivable for them to end up. As 'Microshift' rolls along, the lead of 'Negative Space' isn't altogether followed, but there's a lighter touch to the record, adding contemplation to the already-evident intensity of 2014's brilliant 'The Hum'. 'Static Resistance' is a breezy follow-up, while 'Ullswater''s gloopy, repetitive bassline and anthemic, sweeping conclusion recalls a certain James Murphy. As with the countless brilliant records he's worked on over the last five years, MJ's production shines here - 'Microshift' bristles with life and never sits still. Almost drone-like atmospherics sit on 'The Soft Season', a track which sees the producer's vocals shine, replacing his trademark yelp with something, suitably, altogether softer. He proves himself an increasingly versatile vocalist. While 'The Hum' proved a logical step forward for Hookworms, 'Microshift' pays little attention to the script, and is all the more thrilling for it. -=- SHGZ -=- P.S. ** Thanks *** *** BCC FNT IPC SSR *** *** For Knowing Where The Music Is At *** --===-- ********************* * NuHS we miss you! * *********************