Hood - Restless Urban Fade-outs

England, early '90s: the decline of urban industrial areas produced not only narrators attuned to social introspection, but also bands who sought in guitars and melodies an escape route from often difficult circumstances and realities so bleak as to confirm the most hackneyed clichés about British gloom.

In the same socio-cultural climate that gave rise to the enormous musical ferment which in those same years produced what would be conventionally labelled - then dominant - the britpop and shoegaze phenomena, in Wetherby, a small town not far from Leeds, two young brothers, Richard and Chris Adams, driven simply by what they themselves call "small town boredom", formed the founding and enduring nucleus of a band destined over the years to repeatedly change line-up and artistic direction.

From the very start, Hood positioned themselves somewhat eccentrically in relation to both britpop and shoegaze, as well as to much of the British independent music of the time - from which they nonetheless drew liberally in terms of inspiration and influence, combined with post-punk legacies and transatlantic experiences, first and foremost American college-radio rock. It's no coincidence that among the first names Hood were associated with, alongside My Bloody Valentine, Talk Talk and Fall, were Pavement, Bedhead and Go-Betweens.

The band's earliest recorded efforts were 7" vinyl singles released in editions limited to a few hundred copies between 1992 and 1994 (Sirens, Opening Into Enclosure, 57 White Bread), which paved the way for their first proper album, Cabled Linear Traction, itself originally pressed in a run of just two hundred copies.

The album is still very raw but in some ways startling with its twenty tracks, almost all very brief, attempting to combine post-industrial roughness balanced between garage-rock, shoegaze and a noisy post-wave sound, at times traversed by ethereal vocals and barely sketched melodies (as in "Evening Returns"), in a style very close to that of My Bloody Valentine, also recalled by the rhythms, predominantly dry and lurching.

Although the similarities with Kevin Shields' band and with some contemporary "Madchester" outfits are easy to spot, the Hood heard on Cabled Linear Traction already hint at a more nuanced artistic sensibility, conveyed through Chris Adams' distinctive vocal timbre and flashes of oblique sounds that, over a rough post-punk substrate (culminating in the anguished screams of "Fades To An End" and the eight minutes of "Untitled #2"), introduce hazy, decaying urban atmospheres, no doubt also born of goth-rock reminiscences. The recurring liquid distortions, the inevitable lo-fi aesthetic, the repeated sonic fragmentations and even the folk touches of "Church, Circular" show in embryo the many potentials of a band already possessing its own, if still uncertain, personality - one that from the outset seems unwilling to simply follow in others' footsteps, even while undeniably drawing from them. These elements of Cabled Linear Traction, and the shared musical background of the early Hood, while following different paths, seem to run parallel to those of Disco Inferno and the bands that emerged in those years from the thriving Bristol scene (Flying Saucer Attack in particular), with some of whose members an encounter would prove inevitable and fundamental to the Adams brothers' artistic trajectory.

It's still too early, however, for Hood's name to begin circulating widely in British independent circles: even after the first album, the band continued to produce only extremely limited vinyl editions for various small labels, a habit they would often maintain later on too, by inclination rather than necessity. Meanwhile, despite the scant number of copies of the album and singles in circulation, the West Yorkshire band caught the attention of Slumberland Records, who in 1995 reissued Cabled Linear Traction, still only on vinyl but with slightly wider distribution, and the following year released Silent '88, the first Hood release to also appear on CD.

Though at times rougher-edged than its predecessor, the second album Silent '88 still bears substantial traces of their original indie-noise sound, while laying the groundwork for the Adams brothers' further fascinations, ranging from ambient landscapes built on guitar drones to small, melancholically dreamy sonic sketches. The tracks on Silent '88, once again numerous, are full of ideas, but there's also considerable confusion, and the resulting sense of disorientation suggests that at this point in their still-brief career Hood had not yet clearly identified a direction to take - a choice that would inevitably require abandoning some of the possible modes of expression piled up here in a rather muddled way. Evidence of this lies in the abrasive, inconclusive noise of many tracks and the excess of unfinished fragments under a minute long. Still, there are interesting moments, notably the sickly post-punk of the excellent "Her Innocent Stock Of Words", the bucolic-ambient sketches of "Rural Colours" and "Western Skies", and the feedback-smeared dream-pop of "Hood Northern".

Equally uneven is the compilation Structured Disasters, released more or less at the same time as the second album, gathering the singles from the band's origins up to that point. Disorderly sketches of late-adolescent impetuosity, showing a band still caught between pointlessly disturbing lo-fi noise, clumsy forays into industrial-style electronics and ill-judged homages to Joy Division ("One Way Negative Friend Utilisation"), all made worse, compared to Silent '88, by the almost total absence of genuine stylistic openings or tracks capable of leaving a mark, with the sole exception of "70's Manual Worker", which at least makes explicit, via early Sonic Youth, the Adams brothers' transatlantic reference points.

From these works, which could be called "juvenilia", notable qualities nonetheless shine through, despite all their obvious limitations. For the "ugly duckling" of the early albums to take flight as the proverbial swan, Hood simply needed to channel their energies and settle on a direction to pursue. The label that sensed their potential before anyone else, and gave them the right opportunity, was the important Domino, to which Hood would remain tied for the rest of their career, at least as far as album production is concerned.

It's 1998, and the moment of genuine transformation has arrived: a turning point that (almost) wipes out everything the band had expressed up to then and marks the true beginning of a new artistic arc.

The album that marks the turning point is Rustic Houses Forlorn Valleys, produced and made in collaboration with Matt Elliott (as was the preceding single Useless), at the time still busy with the sonic deconstructions of Third Eye Foundation.

The meeting with Elliott, decisive for both their artistic paths, crowns Hood's growing closeness to Bristol's restless music scene (where the album was recorded) and proves revelatory, both in content and in the expressive means of their music. Rustic Houses Forlorn Valleys overturns, in fact, the convention of twenty-plus short tracks found on all previous works, presenting just six pieces, almost all long and elaborate. The frame of reference also shifts, transplanting metropolitan spleen into the isolationism of the countryside, through a declared immersion in a "forgotten world" in which one can "abandon dreams" while contemplating the sky, as some lines from the opening "S.E. Rain Patterns" put it. This is a genuine manifesto track for the "new" Hood, its nearly ten minutes suspended between sinister ambient textures and iterations of short guitar loops, in a gradual crescendo that implodes into more pronounced chords, furrowed by the aching nostalgia of Elliott's piano and John Clyde-Evans' clarinet.

In this track, as in the two that follow, the ghosts of Talk Talk and, above all, of Bark Psychosis (the singles-era version, rather than the one on "Hex") often hover, echoed too by the frequent electronic loops and field recordings, still carrying faint lo-fi traces, rounded off by acoustic delicacy and muffled rhythms that trace out spare, estranging forms of languid trip-hop on "The Light Reveals The Place" and "Boer Farmstead", the latter also marked by the hypnotic vocals of Nicola Hodgkinson, later the voice behind one of Hood's many side projects, Empress. The second half of the record is livelier, but never loses sight of the band's renewed sensibility, even though guitars take a more pronounced role, at times in quite dense distortion, as in the finale of "Diesel Pioneers": alongside, or more often as a prelude to them, an extraordinary wealth of sounds unfolds, sketching out rural and pastoral landscapes, finally taking the shape of "songs" with spectral melodies barely touched by electronic disturbance, rounded out by Chris Adams' austere alternation of singing and speech.

After completing this album, fundamental both to Hood's discography and to a certain way of understanding (more or less) post-rock "made in England", the collaboration with Matt Elliott continued, becoming stable enough that the Bristol artist was included in the band's line-up for the subsequent tour. It's therefore almost a natural consequence that, shortly after, the same group of musicians who had taken part in Rustic Houses Forlorn Valleys entered the studio to record the following album, also including Andrew Johnson and Craig Tattersall, who around the same time would launch their own minimalist electro-acoustic project, The Remote Viewer.

This is how The Cycle Of Days And Seasons came about, an album that marks the band's move to Leeds, where it was recorded under the production of Richard Formby (Spectrum, Dakota Suite).

The new record continues - almost inevitably, given its premises - along the path laid out by its predecessor, if anything pushing further its most abstract and expansive elements, albeit within more concise songs, aimed at a slender quest for hints of an ethereal yet equally pained song form. The Cycle Of Days And Seasons is a work of contemplative surrender, marked by fragile harmonies and muted, rounded rhythms, almost whispered over sonic beds that blend the slowed-down pace of the most velvety trip-hop with the refinement of frequent violin and piano arrangements, all set against pervasive field recordings and fragments of destructuring noise. The resulting atmospheres, born from the interplay of contrasts between the soft melancholy of oblique melodies and the unease of surfacing loops and distortions, are mostly sinister but almost never oppressive, helped too by the evanescent half-sung, half-spoken vocals of Chris and Nicola, delicately interwoven on the opening "Western Housing Concerns".

From the shadowy ambient-trip-hop of "In Iron Light" to the bucolic visionary quality of "Hood Is Finshed", close to that of Piano Magic, from the acoustic-pastoral textures of "How Can You Drag Your Body Blindly Through?" to the nod to Rachel's on "...The Cliff Edge Of Workaday Morality", The Cycle Of Days And Seasons is the expression of a band now light years removed from its early rawness, and a further step in the direction mapped out by the previous album.

Nevertheless, the Adams brothers' determination to keep exploring new artistic paths does not allow them to settle into the musical equilibrium apparently reached with the last two albums. Indeed, this is precisely the moment of transition to the "third phase" of their career, which comes with a new, radical lineup change: of the group that shaped the albums of the "second phase", only Chris and Richard remain, now joined by drummer Stephen Royle and composer/experimenter Gareth S. Brown on electronics and piano.

The first evidence of the band's renewed expressive register can be found, in early 2001, in the five tracks of the Ep Home Is Where It Hurts, where the sinister atmospheres of the previous two records are plunged into deeper electronic settings, while in some tracks the guitars return in force, shaping the fast, surprisingly "catchy" harmonies of the title track or the dramatic, clearly post-rock-indebted crescendos of "The Fact That You Failed".

By the end of that same year, the change of direction is sealed by the ambitious album Cold House. Once again aided by Richard Formby's production, Hood steer the understated bucolic contemplation of their recent work towards a claustrophobic urban oppression, mindful of the experiences of their recent past, this time generated not by post-punk residue but by a disorienting weave of urban timbres and rhythms. Cold House is in fact the fruit of a bold syncretism between the Hood sound as it had recently taken shape and electronic beats, at times pronounced, over which Chris Adams's serene vocals alternate, on some tracks, with the hip-hop of Dose One and Why?. Beyond the vocal element, hip-hop traces are scattered across almost the whole album, in the form of constant sonic cut-ups, near-danceable rhythms (as on the single "You Show No Emotion At All") and murky atmospheres enveloping pained lyrics almost always delivered in the first person.

The resulting effect is decidedly disorienting: on one hand because the dark synthetic depth is almost always counterpointed by acoustic guitars, flutes, trumpets and the frequent presence of Gareth S. Brown's piano; on the other because, even in such a context, Hood do not give up revisiting the sounds of the first two chapters of their career. Thus there's no shortage of hints of soft rhythms and enveloping expanses ("The River Curls Around The Town"), barely whispered nostalgic harmonies ("Lines Low To Frozen Ground") and even revisitations, cast in more structured melodies, of the guitar-driven directness of their early days ("I Can't Find My Brittle Youth").

Having settled into this new, partial shift, Hood turn to their past, reconstructing much of their career through some of the countless singles put out in limited editions for various small labels, and gathering together many other tracks scattered across compilations and hard-to-find vinyl releases. Two twin maxi-collections are thus released simultaneously on Misplaced Records (a label Richard Adams himself helps run): Singles Compiled and Compilations 1995-2002. The former comprises, across two CDs, almost sixty tracks, around fifteen of which are previously unreleased, all of them dating from before 1998 in any case. The generally short length of the tracks and the artistic period they stem from make it easy to draw a comparison with the earlier compilation Structured Disasters, whose limitations and excessive lo-fi fragmentation are all found here too. The only exceptions are the four most recent tracks, taken from the singles Filmed Iniziative and The Year Of Occasional Lull, both contemporary with Rustic Houses Forlorn Valleys: tellingly, the former - which Hood themselves consider among their finest productions - carries the same atmospheres as that splendid album, while the latter sees the band try their hand, for the first time, at well-defined electronic abstractions.

More interesting is the Compilations 1995-2002 collection, which instead mostly gathers tracks from after the 1998 "turning point" and offers a broad survey of the various musical guises taken on by the Adams brothers in those years, from lingering lo-fi traces to small acoustic fragments, through to more assured and varied approaches to electronics. Worth noting, alongside the hushed acoustic-ambient vignettes "For A Moment, Lost", "The Treacherous Mytholm Steeps" and "Song Of The Sea", are the two genuine hidden gems of the collection: the oblique pop of the would-be single "Sound the Cliche Klaxons" and the hallucinated intensity of "I Have It In My Heart To Jump Into The Ocean", a track again produced by Matt Elliott in 2000 and the ideal link between the band's second and third artistic phases.

After this weighty detour, Hood return to the present, first with the single The Lost You, which includes, besides the compelling title track, four unreleased songs that develop both the descriptive aspects and the rhythmic-ambient components of the previous album's sound, without however losing sight of distant post-wave echoes, now cast in a more pronounced melodic vein.

It is the prelude to Outside Closer, an album in which Hood, aided by old and new collaborators, place explicit emphasis on songs, marked by vocals more structured and assured than in the past, yet still carrying the accumulated experience of artistic activity spanning over a decade by now. Among these, the starting point is precisely the band's recent hip-hop fascinations, still present, though now expressed purely as sonic backdrops, marked by deep bass and iterative rhythmic segmentations, nonetheless drawn together by seductive, undulating melodies ("The Negatives...") and almost romantic acoustic arrangements ("Any Hopeful Thought Arrive"). Alongside the underlying raw immediacy of these tracks and of "The Lost You", Outside Closer also holds gentle echoes of the rural abandonment of Rustic Houses Forlorn Valleys and the laceration of still-surfacing distortions, mostly bound, however, to the constant of a sorrowful, overcast nostalgia running through songs steeped in reflective disenchantment, yet still in constant emotional and musical evolution.

Together with Cold House, Outside Closer represents the definitive consolidation of an expressive form of extraordinary effectiveness, the fruit of experiences and inspirations of a versatility not easily found in other contemporary bands. Hood's path is probably peripheral with respect to supposed musical "movements", yet the distinctiveness and effort of their ongoing personal quest - aimed at rendering in music the thousand shades of the images in their albums' splendid artwork - remains fundamental to a significant slice of the music produced in England over the last decade.

Outside Closer, released in early 2005, is followed by three whole consecutive "sabbatical" years, which by this point raise more than a few doubts as to whether Hood's artistic activity would actually continue, especially if one reads as clues the cover of that last album and the titles of its two closing tracks, "Closure" and "This Is It, Forever". Yet just as the band settles into a prolonged dormant phase, 2007 finds the Adams brothers busy with two new projects.

Chris, in fact, joined by Odd Nosdam, Chris Cole (Manyfingers) and Mark Simms (drummer of Sierpinski), releases on Anticon the debut work of Bracken, "We Know About The Need", in which he picks up and develops the antinomy between harmony and dissonance, between the cohesiveness of enveloping arrangements and the harsh fragmentation of electronic flickers and crackles, often following directly on from what was expressed on the band's last album. Richard, meanwhile, kicks off his new artistic venture, The Declining Winter, with an interesting 7" titled "The Future Sound Of Hip Hop Parts 1 & 2", on which his brother and, once again, Chris Cole also collaborate.

Only time will tell whether these projects are simply parallel to Hood or their true successors, but it already seems certain that, fifteen years after their debut, the Wetherby brothers' urge to pursue new artistic paths is far from spent.

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