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Swooning in with melodies you can file somewhere
between The Byrds and Sigur Ros, the
debut album from The High Wire is aptly named, not so
much for the desert heat depicted on its sleeve as for
the promise of the sunshine that late spring and
summer will bring. Tim Crompton's music blossoms with
the heady scent of May flowers, a reward for suffering
through what's left of winter and the spring rain
that's yet to come.
Hazy, drenched in orchestral strings and coming in
short at a blissful twenty-something minutes, it's a
somewhat frustrating album, however: excellent
chill-out music except that you generally need to
chill-out for longer than this, perfect background
music for the indie dinner party as long as you're
only planning on serving one course.
What there is of it, though, is small but perfectly
formed. Ranging from instrumental, to using voices as
instruments in tracks whose lyrics can't really be
discerned, to songs with proper words (heard most
clearly on Easy, a radio-friendly pebble to please
Flaming Lips fans). More recently, bands such
as Blackbright Morning Light and Yorios
have ploughed the same furlough.
You Don't Know What I Know adds a heartbeat bass
line to underpin the delicate beauty of the earlier
songs. It's a hymn to anyone who's kept a foot in the
doors of perception, the kind of music through which,
if you close your eyes and concentrate on your
breathing, you'll be allowed a brief glimpse back
through the keyhole.
All of this is much what you'd expect of an album
lent vocals by A Girl Called Eddy and Emma
McGlynn, produced by Julian Simmons who counts
both of them - as well as Guillemots and
Midlake - amongst his repertoire. The
psychedelic influences are gently West Coast, running
their fingers down the G-spots of today's sonic
cathedrals before going home to plunder the quieter
moments of Love and Gram Parsons,
particularly on Rope Walking.
Beautiful as it is, where Ahead Of The Rain fails
to lift itself above the average is in its lack of
substance. When the music is so gossamer light, we
could do with a little more of it: twenty minutes is
too short a time to fit in eight tracks unless you're
adrenelin-fueled speed freak punks. As a result, it's
all a bit insubstantial, leaving you wanting more not
because it was so good but because you feel you
haven't yet had enough.
In the modern world of downloads and MP3s, there's
no reason for albums to be stuck into a rut of 40-45
minute conformity but at the same time if you're going
to short-change the listener, you really need to have
a good reason why and The High Wire don't. Let's hope
their live performances are more substantial.
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