the animalhouse 'animal'

(boilerhouse cd) - out now

you all know who they are by now, but what exactly are the animalhouse? the new prog rock? the new old psychedelia? their pedigree (various parts ride, mystics and disco 45) offer all manner of alternatives. the answer, as ever, is all of them and none of them. simple, isn't it?

this debut single - over  year in the making - offer glimpses of the finished picture to come with their album in a month or so's time. 'animal' shimmies in with a spooked machine-ago voodoo intro and then canters off like some furtive, urgent twist on the mystics' sci-fi psychedelia. it's stripped of sam williams' former band's honey-dipped poppiness, though; instead it's infused with a clanging, almost industrial edginess. it's a clinical piece of cyber-pop, seamlessly executed, seemingly stretching to touch every available base but delicately avoiding any hint of straw-clutching. it's retro-futurism eating itself for dinner. it's a semi-precious stone deliberately cut and polished into the wrong shape. it was probably written by aliens after they crashed in a tibetan hemp field.

after which, 'sodium glow' is oddly unengaging. sam sings like some female jazz crooner and the smoky song, with it's theramin and scratching, aims vaguely towards the portishead scheme of things but dies before it gets going. considerably more fully-formed is 'essence' which like the lead track takes its pick of all sorts of styles, from trip-hop and dub to scratchy bauhaus-style gothic rock and discreetly welds them onto a dreamy 60s pop song, somewhere between donovan and the monkees if either had been exposed to a heavy dose of primal scream's 'screamadelica'. it's a cleverly focused fusion of light (touch) and dark (moods) and everything we'd hoped from the band's first release.

it's going to be a hell of a year for the animalhouse. their individual legacies will come back to help and haunt them, but those old sounds rarely intrude on these new songs. 1999 was a year when guile was forever submerged under bombast; this year will see the revenge of intelligent pop. the animalhouse are not some muso's wet dream, they have more of a pop sensibility than most bands could ever imagine.

dale kattack

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