It’s been thirty years since the last album, but the music of Sonic Boom has remained a constant on my record players since I was sixteen, and this beautifully measured record is a return to the forms; it doesn’t particularly sound like any of his previous records, but it is unmistakably the work of Pete Kember.
Of all the post-psych guitar bands that emerged in the mid-1980s, Kember’s music is the most recognisable; in thrall in part to an inglorious, fuzzy past, but never once backwards-looking, even when telescoping the trails of Thirteenth Floor Elevators in Spacemen 3 or the bubbles and pulses of David Vorhaus. Spacemen 3’s best moments, for me — the calm after the storms found in their cover of “Transparent Radiation” or the quieter, beatific moments of Playing With Fire (Playing After Fire always seems to me a more appropriate title) — attained a holy kind of purchase on my young soul, acted like adult lullabies.
When my youngest child was born, I used to sing a lot of their songs at bedtime and bath-time; they had melodies that a child could understand, a psychology that was immediately recognisable to any age. I haven’t sung any Loop. Childlike (or child-friendly), for me, is the highest praise possible in music; I find it very difficult to truly love (or even appreciate) music that young children have no response to, and Kember’s music has consistently been worthy of attention in this regard, even when it’s at its most visceral or most amorphous (the longform studies of E.A.R., for instance). At the level of frequency, there is a timeless quality to all of his music and so it is with this new album. I put it on and my child started dancing. It got into his head and his bones within a few moments. It begins in a way that reminds a little, in terms of motion, of “Big City”, recorded at a time when Spacemen 3 were dissolving. “Just Imagine” has a gentle propulsion, raised on sloping synthesisers, opening up vistas of possibility in a resolutely positive fashion. Whereas often this kind of dream-life is evoked as a sub-HP Lovecraft dreams-as-nightmares fashion or idle, post-psychedelic mental ambling, here Sonic Boom imagines a set of worlds that might be altogether better than our one and, routing thought at the level of what if everyone finally understood what we could be thinking about.There is mercifully no dark ambient here, even when the tracks appear to take a turn away from the light, as in tracks like “Spinning Coins And Wishing On Clovers”, which could almost fit alongside Coil’s Musick To Play In The Dark series. Instead, Sonic Boom works at the level of a sudden understanding, a verstehen, of joy. His bubbling psychedelia is one that seems to love the world and it seems a recent relocation in Kember’s life has in part stimulated this; he certainly seems to be in a good place and if there is a very occasional sadness in some of the tracks, then this too comes from a place where, overall, there is calm.
I don’t have any details about the collaborators on this record, but three or four tracks seem imbued with his production work on the recent Panda Bear records. Noah Lennox is heard here, I think, and if it isn’t him then it’s his spirit. A friendly ghost in the studio. Some tracks seem like it was where Animal Collective were going around the time of the “My Girls” single. On Merriweather Post Pavilion, though, Animal Collective seemed to want to stuff their sound-world with Bomb Squad-like intensity, so that individual sounds found it difficult to rise to the surface; whereas on All Things Being Equal (the clue is in the title), Sonic Boom allows similar frameworks to breathe.This is not to say this is minimal music, far from it, but each instrument, each sound, is placed at a distance from the others, so that the brain is allowed to follow different melodies as well as the intersection of those melodies. It never feels muddy. Sonic lets everything breathe, even when he’s filling spaces with squiggly synth noises or dayglo drones or gentle washes of sound. On these tracks, I guess I’m reminded mostly of the first (fantastic) Panda Bear album, especially in the way the vocals are recorded; this could easily be an arrangement for a choir of sharply-dressed young men. While this is a very different beast from that album, it shares a soundworld, a belief in how the world should sound and you get the feeling that both men hear this kind of thing when they’re not thinking about anything else. Clearly, Sonic Boom and Panda Bear have found affinity in each others’ work and, at times, they seem to merge into one being. It’s a great being.
During these strange times, I’ve listened to this album more than any other. It will remind me, paradoxically, of these isolated times, but it undoubtedly has a palliative effect; it sounds like a group of people living together and enjoying the crowd. It invites you to imagine the best bits of a world that, just a matter of weeks ago, we all knew and are now beginning to forget. It’s probably a good time to listen, folks.-Loki-
