Album Review

The Lea Shores – The Lea Shores

• 13th Jul 2009

One way to look at this is London-based shoegazers The Lea Shores have just released approximately the 1000th MBV cum Sixties avant-garde psych-pop influenced record this year with their eponymous debut. It opens with a crashing, insistent pylon of guitars and ‘atmosphere’ in Velvet Lies which teeters on the verge of a transcendent melody but palpably makes it across on mood. Lead single Guillotine has the requisite keyed-in ambient effect river twinkles and float harmonics disposition, the mandatory glimpse of sitar and drone soaked mid-paced psychedelic substances, mid-eight tingles from the engineering box of ‘how to conjure up critical epithets’ and some harder fret- board coda dissolves to justify the rock. Folk inflections flicker across some of the tracks and the remainder teeter between tasteful cacophony and a fragility that might just be caution– or lowered levels.

It’s a sound we’ve heard enough times and yet… and yet, as the record swirls around you, and snatches linger in your memories replayed after it ends, as the Lea Shores then, coalesce into something beyond that instinctive weariness that shrouds the first play, words like ‘craft’—or ‘openness’- start forming. That modernised electro acoust-rock is suddenly all threads of harmonies spiralling, chamber pop strings wrenching, the strumming into minor chords and sonic tremble and all into the kind of affective space-folk that Joker’s Daughter’ and collectives like Notenuf records came out with recently. Rise meanwhile has a sprawling near-blues shuffle. Fear SOS is dizzy swirling clanging pop—with vocals halfway between Buckley and Brown, with a fragile-swagger oxymoronism halfway between the two; its clanging widescreen textures concluding not in easy triumph but abstract dreamy tinge. Other tracks are more plaintive-filled with electro-organicism shuffles across foothills, coming on all very nu- Manchester with introspective roars and knotty versions of terrace psychedelia. Uber-producer Ben Hiller’s production weaves, compresseses and then lets echo, the force and shape of their attack.

Hitting the right-minor-notes and working the energy and frisson, the urgency in their sounds stops it sinking into the pall afflicting most ‘sincere’ music, whilst even the retro-space fx atmospherics come loaded with an instinct for the right tone-switch. Strings turn the screw, being piercingly sweet whilst juddering like clock-notes and then floating over fields in grey skies and stone-walls become movie scenes. Speaking to ‘ the people’ , whoever they are, this heartfelt soundtracks the grey-magic spell of emotion thrown over the everyday —the magic detail in the room, the past regret, the comedown documented with the sharpened affectedness sense of bleary-eyes looking for what’s pure. Stripped of the one-record worth of grace such ambience allows them, for a longer career they might have to hone their melody combinations or go left-field. But as an opening shot the Lea Shores have given us rather successfully pretty much every hue, tone, cadence and vibe you could want for any dense-but with chink-of-light bedroom wallow.

Photo By Duncan Nicholls