August 27, 2002

The Music : The Music

Leeds foursome's fearsome debut - all hail the real cosmic rough riders

7 / 10 Right-thinking people should hate The Music. They look like cabbage-brained Ashcroftian neo-hippies who smoke too much weed, swap feeble stoner jokes, listen to Bob Marley in the mistaken belief that it makes them more 'spiritual', light their own farts, find buried alien messages in Teletubbies, then fall asleep in their shitty stude-scum clothes. Tomorrow, of course, they will skin up and do it all again. Forever.

But then you hear the volcanic passion and electric conviction of the tumultuous, irony-free, pagan tree-shagging high-wire spunkfest that is 'The Music' and your high-art indie-wank snobbery crumples like a pair of designer Hoxton shades flattened to fuck under a steam-powered juggernaut of Yorkshire-accented cosmic thunder. The Music have crossed over from a parallel-universe Leeds to shaft your preconceptions with their ungovernable priapic majesty.

Epic is the scale. Frazzled are the incantations. Heavy are the riffs. Ablaze are the lakes of fire burning in the bellies of these preposterously ungainly jams. But tempting as it may be to dismiss The Music as goblin-hatted revivalists of late '60s/early '70s wankbluster, Robert Harvey and co are distinct from previous dabblers in these dark arts - Verve, Roses, Spiritualized, Primals - in that they were not even born when prog-rock druids walked the earth. Their allegiance is to this music's timeless voodoo energy, not half-remembered playground obsessions or an older sibling's vintage vinyl collection.

Their all-or-nothing ambition is exhilarating, however raw the execution. Right from the off, 'The Dance' sweeps you along in its hurricane currents, its skyscraper-sized fuzz-rock melodrama evolving into a rhythmic riot of robot-wars machine-funk. 'The Truth Is No Words' is as rude and declamatory as the MC5 jamming with the Strokes, punishing garage disco meets libidinous bluescore. And 'Float' reaches beyond freakout anthemics into boiling Muse-style dementia, all turbo-splurging baroque'n'roll guitars and poundingly martial clusterbeats. Crucially, The Music are fluid and lubricated, not stiff and reverential, so even their most retro-leaning moments sound vital and visceral and fully engorged.

Sure, there are tracks here where mojo-rising Led Zeppelin sludge-blues ('Turn Out The Light' and 'Take The Long Road And Walk It') or attempts to replicate Jim Morrison's high-priest fertility rites ('Human' and 'Disco') deliver more mist than mountain. But this is a debut album, heroically unfashionable, as brash and untainted as the audacious adolescent alchemists who made it. Acknowledge the flaws but salute the cause, because 'The Music' points to either vaulting greatness or grand folly, but bravely leaves no room for the indie-wank compromises in between.

Like Abba said, thank you for The Music.

Stephen Dalton