I love Cricket and have been sliding home early from work to watch as many games in the World cup as possible.
One player is simply ‘massive’ in all he does. West Indies opener, Chris Gayle, is now nearly 40 but can still smack a ball from Wednesday into Saturday and he is sheer pantomime villain when bowling his nasty ‘stay low’ spinning cutters, winding both batsmen and the opposition up with his sly piss take histrionics…even in a potentially sleepy game like cricket, there is always something that alerts you to his (brilliant) presence.
This fourth album by Mike Adams at his Honest Weight has that same sense of massive. The default is ‘gigantic melodies’ through which he entwines whatever chosen brilliance fits most appropriately with the ultimate conclusion of brilliance.
Tracks such as Do You One Better, That’s One Way (see below) and I Need You evoke aural images of the melodies that would exist in the hinterland between where The Beach Boys stopped and The Feeling started and slide these in, out and around various levels of atmospheric jangled riffs. There has been a lot of talk recently about how long the perfect pop song should be, with many postulating it must be as short as two minutes…the way these tracks breathe through various levels of development prove such theorem to be incorrect.
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It’s not just pretty though (although it is never truly escaped). Tracks such as Pressing Mesh and Wonderful Love (see below) drop the sense of gigantic and add a slight fuzz-pop sensibility as Adams drops the intensity and tempo to drift perceptibly close to indie folk. It’s a welcome, difference if only because too much emphasis on obvious beauty could become saccharine sweet.
The album is plainly larger than any of his previous three with bedroom pop being replaced by obvious studio lusciousness and on this occasion the often feared and denigrated change is superb.
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