Album Review : The Longcut - Open Hearts
- Written by Rory Gibb
Remember the slightly bizarre dance-punk craze a few years ago? In the wake of the release of The Rapture's (admittedly brilliant) 'House Of Jealous Lovers' single, certain sectors of the music press became almost unbearably excitable about this emergent 'new' sound and in doing so managed to lump together a large number of artists who had about as much in common with one another as a spoon with a fork.
Attempting to draw parallels between, say, the hyper-percussive extended jams of a band like !!! and Les Savy Fav's art-school punk explosion was almost inevitably doomed to failure; dance-punk as a genre term quickly went the way of sports metal, to briefly re-emerge a couple of years later in your favourite weekly as 'the godfathers of nu-rave'.
The Longcut have been knocking around since about the same time, peddling their own particular brand of dance-inflected post-rock that owes as much to My Bloody Valentine and At The Drive-In as it does Television and Talking Heads. Yet whilst many of the bands from this early explosion have either faded away (The Rapture) or progressed to different things (!!!, LSF), on second effort Open Hearts The Longcut continue to explore the same kind of ground as always - testament either to the uselessness of lazy genre typecasting or to the miasma of influences that ensure their music remains more-or-less uncategorisable.
I first encountered them in 2003 or so, when a friend of my brother's gave him an early 12" single of theirs; I was impressed but not overly bothered, until a couple of years later when I received a promo copy of a single from their first album. The track in question, 'Gravity in Crisis', was and remains an attractively spacey and drawn out piece of work, monotone vocals over dance beats interspersed with extended periods of instrumental guitar interplay. Most of the music on Open Hearts takes this formula and runs with it; opener 'Out At The Roots' blasts straight into a trebly punkish thrash, Stuart Ogilvie's voice noticeably straining at a high pitched chant before the percussion drops away and the song heads into space, measured guitars chiming over a gradually building maelstrom and a fade to nothingness. Such stargazing is the band's raison d'etre; one of the most striking moments on Open Hearts is during the title track's interlude, as echo-drenched guitars drift freely in stasis above a 4/4 beat, simulating a rush of endorphins as they spiral skyward and leave ghostly vapour trails in their wake.
There is also considerable appeal to be found in the album's more reflective moments; the influence of post-rock and shoegaze comes increasingly to the fore when the guitars are given some downtime and space to breathe, as on album centrepiece 'Mary Bloody Sunshine', which swells from its ambient interlude to a bristling, distorted climax. Yet for all its pleasantry, across the entirety of its length Open Hearts tends to stick closely to the same formula throughout. Not a problem per se when the formula is a good one, and occasionally dazzling, but the comfortable pace of a large proportion of the record only serves to highlight further the points at which it really starts to break a sweat.