Available on: Domino LP
Bit of a disclaimer, first. I love Alexis Taylor. I love nearly everything about him. I think him and that Hayden Thorpe out of them Wild Beasts are the best singers of this century. I bitterly resent the songs Joe sings on Hot Chip records, and the same applies to that other guy in Wild Beasts who sounds like the lead singer of Editors. I would follow Taylor into Hell and, as has apparently happened, into a lounge record. How long before I forsake my beloved underdog’s underdog, after one Moog trill too many? Here goes.
Start and Complete was recorded in one day, with no group member having the same demos as others, to aid improvisation. Most songs were recorded in one take; the ten-minute jam cover of ‘You’re No Good’ testifies this. All the songs sound the same. But that’s okay! Loads of good music all sounds the same: The Ramones, James Brown, Daniel Beddingfield. It mostly sounds like a mixture of lounge bar jazz, or jazz bar lounge, MOR Al Green, and that Fleetwood Mac song they use on the M&S adverts. Yet perversely, this isn’t explicitly bad.
The album’s roughly split into two modes: the extended moody jam with a handful of lyrics, and the bright and brief flurry of poetry, all delivered on electric pianos and Hammonds. Belonging to the former are ‘You’re No Good’, ‘Rough And Smooth’, and ‘Lay Me Down’. Belonging to the latter are ‘There’s A Way to End This Run Of Doubt’, ‘Dreamt I Saw You Late Last Night’, and the bookending twin versions of ‘Married to the Sea’.
The tracks on the latter are a lot better. They are relentless, constantly sweeping up with no pauses between lines. This is presumably something to do with the fact that a lot of it was recorded in one take: with a lineup of improvisers making an album not largely concerned with commercial gain, the tendency to drift into jams is probably quite strong. So you get these 90 second songs which sound beautifully forcefully compressed, as if they’re inhibiting their own musicianship for the sake of brevity. And that’s something which I think is good.
‘Repair Man’ is a strange mid-point between these two styles and the best song on the album. It starts off slow, simply chords lapping up against a static, insignificant lyrics. Then around the middle the lyrics diverge and come thick and fast, retaining their nursery rhyme simplicity but arriving so frequently that they’re juxtaposed against one another. I’m reliably told, from a variety of sources, that the song is 2 minutes 23 seconds long but it feels at least twice that.
I’m in two minds about whether or not this is better than Taylor’s solo album, Rubbed Out. On the whole, I think it takes it by a nose. Rubbed Out was one of those albums that claims to be about “sketches of songs”, not proper songs. In an interview about About Group, Taylor said “we could do an experimental album, then do a song album”. But what’s happened here is both. With this simple, long-short dichotomy in the songs, you get Taylor’s weeping croon on the -here comes a disgusting phrase – song-based half of the album, then the other half picks it up and allows it to – have another one – breathe.
James Hampson
