A Tried And Tested Video

• 21st Sep 2006

Following the release of the critically acclaimed debut album A Call And Response, The Longcut will release A Tried And Tested Method as their next single. The track comes with an essential remix from Brighton funksters The Go! Team, who add trademark quirky beats to The Longcut’s original.

See the video for the new single here:
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In fact it’s a double header of a release as yes, there’s more…. an exclusive, online download EP for the bargain price of £1.50. Four tracks in all, including Idiot Check as an exclusive plus Vitamin C, Lonesome No More! and The Kiss Off from their debut album. Produced at Airtight Studios in Manchester with Giles Hatton from fellow Manchester legends The Earlies at the controls.

Built around Lee Gale’s dreamy guitar picking, A Tried And Tested Method is one of the mellower moments on the band’s high-octane album. Lush, refined and melodic, this is The Longcut at their hypnotic best – just listen for the bit where the lilting breakbeat gives way to a pulsing 4/4 stomp. The Go! Team remix takes the raw ingredients and cooks up something fresh and tasty. Adding clattering drums, melodica, backing vocals and plenty of vintage-sounding fuzz, it’s an inspired reworking that would have been well situated on the band’s own Thunder Lightning Strike album.

As with all of The Longcut’s output, it’s safe to say that A Tried And Tested Method sounds like no other single released this year. In these times of Britpop revivalists and haircut rockers, The Longcut exist on their own plane. Since releasing their debut EP, Transition, in 2004, they have striven to do things their own way. As word of the band’s astonishing live shows spread, they stepped back, releasing a further EP, A Quiet Life, and quietly planning their definitive statement, A Call And Response. Released to widespread acclaim in June 2006, the album drew comparisons to Joy Division’s doomy soundscapes and Radiohead’s cerebral electronica, hitting the right note with critics and fans of inventive, intelligent and instinctive music.

Recorded in six weeks with Massive Attack producer Johnny Dollar, the album was mixed by TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek. “We turned up in New York to meet him and found that he’s completely and utterly mad,” says bassist John Fearon. “He mixed quite a lot of it in the space of four days and he didn’t sleep or leave the studio.”

A Tried And Tested Method came from these sessions. Textured, layered and intense, it’s a fine example of that marriage of the mathematical and the chaotic, the instinctual and the calculated, the elements that make The Longcut’s sound so visceral and exciting.