Spiral 25 E. P. Review
"SPIRAL 25
‘Spiral 25 EP’
(Own Label)
Rock and roll’s dark side of the street – the side where the pimps and smack dealers and rakish leather-clad waifs exist in eternal shadow – has always held a more seedily romantic lure than the sunny side. From The Velvet Underground’s speed’n’smack rock experimentalism through The Stooges, Spacemen 3 and Warlocks, the needle traces a blackened line that can veer off at strange, exotic tangents or spiral forever inwards. Here’s where you’ll find Spiral 25, the band, lest we forget, formed by assorted members of The Factory, arguably one of Oxford’s great lost bands, certainly of recent years. Reconvened after a brief time under the moniker Dirty Sci-Fi, guitarist Chris Monger, bassist Joe Chapman and drummer Andy Proper have recruited guitarist Sunny Singh and vocalist Russell Denham, a singer in the spaced-out and devotional mode of Jim Morrison, and set out to dig their musical furrow deep and claustrophobic. They wear their influences not so much on their sleeves as stamped on their foreheads but confidently and with singleminded unselfconsciousness, and as they lay down a groove as black as a fallen angel’s armpit, guitars providing a shifting pattern of textures over the relentless rhythm, you’re lost in a flotation tank full of tar and treacle, the hymnal ‘Let The Light Shine On’ spiralling through Loop’s heavy-duty psychedelia with grim, morbid determination, while ‘Signals’ bubbles spaceward from its subterranean beginnings, a kindred spirit to Spacemen 3’s ‘Things Will Never Be The Same’.
As the mood darkens through the EP, Spiral 25 really hit bedrock with ‘Today’s Future
(Tomorrow’s Past)’, exhuming those old blues via The Doors’ ‘The End’ and a ceaseless narcotic grind that’s so thick with soot you feel you need to scrub out your lungs by the time it finishes. It may be a musical cliché but this is one CD you really must play at excruciating volume to do it full justice. Thankfully, if the neighbours do call the police, you’ll be so whacked out on the pretty fractal patterns in your head you won’t even mind when they cart you off."
Dale Kattack
Nightshift, Oxford's Music Magazine. March 2009.
‘Spiral 25 EP’
(Own Label)
Rock and roll’s dark side of the street – the side where the pimps and smack dealers and rakish leather-clad waifs exist in eternal shadow – has always held a more seedily romantic lure than the sunny side. From The Velvet Underground’s speed’n’smack rock experimentalism through The Stooges, Spacemen 3 and Warlocks, the needle traces a blackened line that can veer off at strange, exotic tangents or spiral forever inwards. Here’s where you’ll find Spiral 25, the band, lest we forget, formed by assorted members of The Factory, arguably one of Oxford’s great lost bands, certainly of recent years. Reconvened after a brief time under the moniker Dirty Sci-Fi, guitarist Chris Monger, bassist Joe Chapman and drummer Andy Proper have recruited guitarist Sunny Singh and vocalist Russell Denham, a singer in the spaced-out and devotional mode of Jim Morrison, and set out to dig their musical furrow deep and claustrophobic. They wear their influences not so much on their sleeves as stamped on their foreheads but confidently and with singleminded unselfconsciousness, and as they lay down a groove as black as a fallen angel’s armpit, guitars providing a shifting pattern of textures over the relentless rhythm, you’re lost in a flotation tank full of tar and treacle, the hymnal ‘Let The Light Shine On’ spiralling through Loop’s heavy-duty psychedelia with grim, morbid determination, while ‘Signals’ bubbles spaceward from its subterranean beginnings, a kindred spirit to Spacemen 3’s ‘Things Will Never Be The Same’.
As the mood darkens through the EP, Spiral 25 really hit bedrock with ‘Today’s Future
(Tomorrow’s Past)’, exhuming those old blues via The Doors’ ‘The End’ and a ceaseless narcotic grind that’s so thick with soot you feel you need to scrub out your lungs by the time it finishes. It may be a musical cliché but this is one CD you really must play at excruciating volume to do it full justice. Thankfully, if the neighbours do call the police, you’ll be so whacked out on the pretty fractal patterns in your head you won’t even mind when they cart you off."
Dale Kattack
Nightshift, Oxford's Music Magazine. March 2009.
Labels: music, Nightshift, Oxford, Review, Spiral 25
posted by Spiral 25 at
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