Skep Wax
Whilst on paper a collaboration between a successful modern poet (Brian Bilston) and an ensemble co-led by indie-pop veterans (Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey’s The Catenary Wires) might suggest a slightly unwieldy and ephemeral vanity side-project, in aural reality Sounds Made By Humans proves to be a deeply entertaining and durable product from the creative conjoining of like-minded souls.
Far from taking a straightforward poetry-read-out-over-a-tasteful-backdrop approach, this is a truly mind-melded and dynamic ensemble affair. With Bilston, Fletcher and Pursey sharing around speaking and singing duties, the album brings across the observational text framing techniques of the latter two’s other current band venture (Swansea Sound) and adds in some richly diverse magpie musicality (fleshed out with help from Ian Button on drums and Fay Hallam on keyboards), to adroitly stretch out Bilston’s brilliantly biting and witty previously published wordplay.
All the individual quirks and highlights are too numerous to detail here, but there are several particular strong exemplars to mention. Hence, amongst it all, you’ll notably find musings on the AI-outsourcing of human advice funnelled through shoegaze-swirled yearning (“Alexa, What Is There To Know About Love?”) or wistful dreaminess loaded with historic pop lyric satirising (“Every Song On The Radio Reminds Me Of You”).
There are latter-day life procrastinations wrapped into vintage garage-rock sounds (“To Do List”); flashbacks to thwarted mix-tape-inspiring crushes with twanging nods to Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” (“Compilation Cassette”); misanthropic manifesto-making married to post-punk stomps and clangs (“31 Rules For Midlife Rebellion”); and maturity- rebuffing cogitations set inside a Guided By Voices-meets-The Slits churn (“Thou Shalt Not Commit Adulting”).
Primed to be particularly relatable and appealing to certain contemporaneous forty-to-fifty-somethings, whose cultural tastes and philosophical dispositions were cemented before the onset of the internet age, Sounds Made By Humans is an abundantly inventive and highly listenable statement.
-Adrian-
