1. Cuts Across The Land
2. Stubborn Stitches
3. Darling, You're Mean
4. Win Your Love
5. Hello To The Floor
6. Bottom Of The Sea
7. Fades The Sun
8. You Were Born Inside My Heart
9. Lion Rip
10. Lovetones
11. Love Is An Unfamiliar Name
12. Red Weather
Just when you thought it might be safe to slate
guitar bands again, along comes another one,
determined to demonstrate that basking in the white
heat of The Velvet Underground is still the
default position of aspiring, slightly-disaffected,
art rocker-types.
The question is, can The Duke Spirit transcend
familiar influences and strike a dimly-lit pose that
is all their own? The answer, if you can't be arsed to
read to the end of this review, is yes, they can. At
times. And there's the rub.
As singer Leila Moss is a woman fronting an
all-male combo, the usual immediate connections will
already appear by rote. And yup, the PJ Harvey-isms
are impossible to ignore in the howling wolf moments
of Darling You're Mean and Win Your Love. Most of the
time though Leila glides over the feedback dialogues
like an de-francophiled Trish of Broadcast.
A little less sonic, but a lot more youth, You Were
Born Inside My Heart presides over some ear-ringing
Thurston Moore churn. A meditation on burgeoning
success ("How's your fame / don't say you didn't want
it"), its palpable fear of the unknown is echoed by
Lovetones ("I don't know what's to come").
Single Love Is An Unfamiliar Name dips a wonky
fringe into 'angular' territory. Avoiding the atonal
and/or sub-Bowie operatics that the form tends to
demand, Moss excels with a double-tracked
staccato approach. A backbeat mixed daringly low, Love
Is An Unfamiliar Name crackles and hisses in a
tinny-transistor radio way that irradiates the higher
registers. It's almost a kind of pop music in a
platinum-selling Mercury Rev sort of world.
And now for the rub. For this kind of gnarled
noize to really work, you need 'a performance that
goes all the way'. It's okay to play at being unhinged
and carnal ( like Win Your Love's "I know those eyes
/ And I want those bones"), but do The Duke Spirit
believe in the part they're playing?
These Dooks could have been spawned by a
cacophonous night of intimacy between Merzbow
and Yoko Ono, but they sound like nice
boho-types who wrap up warm for winter and are all
round good eggs. Even when Moss sullenly exclaims "I'm
so cheap" and "I'm a nightmare" (Darling You're
Mean), you understand there's little wrong that a
fresh brew and a fitful snooze won't solve.
The Duke Spirit just about hold back from fronting
up to the blaring void. Still, "excited by noise" (Red
Weather) as they are, they can still ride a rock 'n'
roll whirlwind in a way that makes Jason Pierce's last
outing sound forced. Stubborn Stitches lets loose in
Iggy-style catharcism, while Fades Into The Sun
threatens to become Mega City Four before
settling happily in the neighbourhood of
Motorhead.
Though The Duke Spirit lack the Tex Avery mania of
the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or the eye-bulging
strutting confidence of Polly Harvey, they do have an
easy way with structured reverberative grooves. And
with Hello To The Floor and Bottom Of The Sea,
trinket-box, candle-bearing balladry, they're not too
shy to step outside the comfort of the maelstrom.
Cuts Across The Land may be nothing new under the
sun, but it might be the start of something wonderful.
Might of course. And there's the rub.