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This New Zealand trio are clearly happy to do
things at their own speed, an approach that can be
applied to their music as well as their ability to
finish a record. And so it is that The Sound Inside
follows up their debut album, the electronica opus
Roofers, by some eight years.
Granted, in that time the band have been busy with
other things, not least Zane Lowe, known much
more for his media exploits as a Radio 1 DJ than his work the other
side of the studio doors. You might assume that given
his drive and enthusiasm for presenting that Lowe
would be part of a hyperactively charged musical
approach, but here he's happy to join band mate
Hamish Clark and more recent recruit, singer
Andy Lovegrove, in making some blissed-out
music.
While Roofers dealt primarily with electronica The
Sound Inside goes for a more earthy, acoustic sound,
with emotionally concentrated vocals to boot. It's
easy-going for sure, but that doesn't render it
lightweight. Indeed the shafts of light the
contentedly upbeat vocals bring seem occasionally to
be masking something a little darker, a feeling hinted
at in the lyrics of Settle Down, which murmurs "seems
the more you suffer too, the more I settle down", over
a warm fretless bass sound.
Elsewhere Lowe's carefree, 'love life' attitude
shines through and is shared by the band. The
Otherside searches with Lovegrove's falsetto verse and
finds an anthemic, gospel-tinged chorus. Last Night
taps into a Massive Attack vibe, a torch song
whose verse melody strongly resembles REM's
Everybody Hurts. Meanwhile the tender A Place For You
invites the subject to "just come down next to
me".
Just as the record seems about to go on too long it
reigns in with a couple of twilight moments, the
penultimate track even bringing a sense of impending
occasion with its "the time has come" lyrics. Not a
heavyweight close, but once again a bit of depth
brought to what might in other hands be a throwaway
collection of tracks.
So a song-based indulgence, then, that draws
lightly on soul, blues and lo-fi folk, not to mention
the hip hop Lowe and Clark know and love. Recruiting
Lovegrove seems to have been something of a
masterstroke for them though, and with him in the mix
the trio's vocal collages bring something of the
desert heat suggested by the cover, and make for a
highly evocative record.
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