This is a record of quiet and displaced loneliness. It’s full of the uncanny sensation that you’ve somehow ended up in the wrong place, but can’t remember where. Which is all very much in keeping with [a]Hood[/a]’s befuddled take on introspective music – where being a shambles is very much an occupational hazard.
Following on from 1996’s ‘Distant Houses And Forlorn Valleys’, this features The Third Eye Foundation‘s Matt Elliott on board as producer. The result is an elegiac combination of medative guitars and inspired tetchy sampling shot through with rainy-day northern melancholy.
‘Western Housing Concerns’ evokes wet afternoons in their native Wetherby. Half-audible whispering voices alongside looped muffled church bells of ‘September Brings The Autumn Dawn’ make for ambient disquiet without ever falling into tweeness. Elsewhere, on ‘The Cliff Edge Of Workday Morality’ strings haunt, adding to the delicate weary tone.
Call it post-rock if you like but [a]Hood[/a], like the quiet army of Godspeed You Black Emperor!, have found in the genre a new means of expression: leaving behind self-consciousness noodling and experimentation for its own sake by adding grace and intensity. Here, quite possibly, is a bit of the future. And it’s [I]quiet[/I].