Hood

England, early 2000s: the chronological shift makes itself felt with full force, exposing even more clearly that drive to reshuffle modes of expression and musical forms which, even in the previous decade, the English scene had been anything but immune to.

And perhaps no one was better placed than Hood, the band led by brothers Chris and Richard Adams, to take up the challenge of this paradigm shift, both in sensibility and conceptual attitude, measuring themselves against ever new and different experiences.

In the nearly ten years of activity preceding "Cold House", the Leeds band had already passed through two quite distinct phases of their career, moving from the lo-fi indie-noise of their early work to the rural desolation of their masterpiece "Rustic Houses Forlorn Valleys", tellingly made and produced in collaboration with Matt Elliott, a key figure in the restless Bristol scene of the '90s (the one populated, among others, by Amp, Crescent, Movietone and Flying Saucer Attack), and an artist who, in terms of sonic transformation and manipulation, has little to envy in anyone else.

From that same physiognomy, splendidly outlined on "Rustic Houses Forlorn Valleys" and consolidated on the follow-up "The Cycle Of Days And Season", "Cold House" - the fifth Hood album - takes its cue, once again scrambling cardinal points and genre rigidities through the decisive graft of an electronic component never so overt before, along with expressive elements borrowed from the new urban languages that in those years were living through the most brilliant moments of their fusion with "rock".

It's the "third phase" of the English band's arc, one that passes through a radical line-up overhaul (of the original line-up only the Adams brothers remain, joined by drummer Stephen Royle and composer-experimenter Gareth S. Brown on electronics and piano), a shift that manifests in disorienting fashion already on the single that anticipated the release of "Cold House", the visionary "You Show No Emotion At All", a track driven by relentless sonic cut-ups and near-danceable synthetic rhythms, which nonetheless frame invariably murky, anguished atmospheres.

Layered over the thousand fragments of the frantic cut-up is the incredibly balanced alternation and interweaving of Chris Adams's seraphic singing with the hip-hop declamations and manipulations of Dose One and Why?, who add pathos and dynamism to the gleaming, IDM-inflected synthetic pulses of the opening "They Removed All Trace That Anything Had Ever Happened Here" and rough urban timbres to the stretched-out piano loops of "Branches Bare".

Even when their presence isn't expressed through the vocal element, hip-hop traces are scattered across nearly the whole album, in the form of segmented tempos and cadences and, more broadly, a bold syncretism that sets the sounds of the previous two albums on one side and a vibrant, ever-shifting parade of styles - disorienting and constantly mutable in outcome - on the other.

In this renewed setting of bare city walls, Hood nevertheless do not abandon their poetics steeped in repressed memories, bare branches and frozen skies, nor do they give up the sounds of the first two chapters of their career, here put through a process of filtering and decomposition via their new sensibility: there's no shortage, then, of hints of soft rhythms and enveloping dilations ("The River Curls Around The Town"), barely whispered nostalgic harmonies ("Lines Low To Frozen Ground"), and even revisitations, in more structured melodic form, of the guitar-driven directness of their early days ("I Can't Find My Brittle Youth"). All of this, though, is set within a deliberately irregular frame, one in which derailments are always lurking just around the corner, heightening the sense of precariousness and restlessness that runs like an underground current through the whole record, surfacing in the recurring deconstructions of the endings and, above all, in the penetrating, jazzy-paced harshness of "The Winter Hit Hard", an ideal link to the nocturnal hallucinations of Bark Psychosis.

The ambitious and thoroughly successful operation underlying "Cold House" thus proves not to be limited to simply translating the melancholic rural contemplation of "Rustic Houses, Forlon Valleys" into claustrophobic urban oppression; through the faithful counterpoint of a persistent synthetic depth against a myriad of variations introduced by acoustic guitars, flutes, trumpets and the frequent presence of Gareth S. Brown's piano, Hood have crafted a work that eludes definition and categorization - a most worthy representation of the multifaceted nature of the new decade and, at the same time, both a summation and a starting point for that musical post-modernity which, precisely at the intersection of different languages, would go on to find one of its principal reasons for being.

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13/06/2010