Album Review

The Hours – Come On

• 13th Jul 2009

The new single release from feted epic-rockers The Hours-Come On has a fractured waltz quality that soars emotively yet has a distinctly visual texture. Its synaesthesia dabs of colour become miniature scenes from where the town hits the green spill and the canals , the open spaces between abandoned tenements turning from asphalt and dust into flowers. Borne on harmonic soft-swells of violin and burbles of trombones, it’s a rippling miasma of afternoons in tree shadows where along with the interwoven main pianos, are cloudy sonicisms.. The strings clatter and fuss like bird’ caws across the surface of the ominously tranquil day it conjures up. In short, it’s pretty pretty.

For a promo, it—nearly always– has a peculiarly loping feel and hollow-eerie cocoon-like use of space. All the while ‘Come On’, despite its anthem-evoking title, sounds like it should be hidden away to be discovered on an album, counter-pointing the more ebullient lead-off tunes with its stranger pleasures. Chiming deliberate high-end keys echo like the acoustics of small halls, wooden-rehearsal studios or stone buildings around river-banks, almost chapel-like. Until suddenly sharp chirps of The Hour’s Northern Soul slow-groove aura merge with that latent rock vibe brooding coiled from the beginning; cloudbursting to the end with a drive that loses little of its sad-sweetness.