A few weeks before the release of My New Band Believe’s self-titled debut LP, Cameron Picton hosted a series of listening parties in the homes of several New York-based fans. If a fan provided an apartment and a record player, they could choose to open up their home to Picton, who in turn would supply a catered meal and a test pressing of the album.
The idea of an artist making house calls to give their fans a sneak peek of a forthcoming record is an unconventional promotional strategy, to say the least, but an ingenious one. Of all the songs on My New Band Believe, “Love Story” lends itself most obviously to an intimate home listening session, its soft piano and swirling strings painting scenes of a lived-in domestic routine dotted with moments of piqued romance that only sharpen the abrupt tragedy of the track’s end. Similarly, opener “Target Practice” has the winking, shabby-chic charm of a murder-mystery party in a shoebox-sized apartment or a play Jo March would write for her sisters to perform in their family’s home. Described as “Luigi Mangione at the cabaret,” its minimalist twee intro is a painted cardboard Trojan Horse for a choral swell that gives My New Band Believe the grand opening sequence it demands.
This series of listening parties in New York City also mirrors how the record and the rotating cast of guest artists who play on it came together: over a host of sessions with “whoever was around” from Picton’s grab-bag of featured players. Many of these musicians play in acts out of London’s splintered Windmill Scene; members of shame, caroline, Jockstrap, and Black Country, New Road all make appearances. It’s the same scene that birthed Picton’s prior project, the Windmill era’s defining group, black midi. As the bassist and sometimes-frontman of the anarchic post-punk-turned-avant-prog outfit, Picton was a stoic, enigmatic foil to bandmate Geordie Greep’s manic, demon-carnival-barker showmanship, but such a binary feels reductive when Picton’s restraint made him an even more unpredictable player, capable of outlandish payoff in tracks like “7-eleven,” “Speedway,” and Hellfire highlights “Slow” and “Eat Men, Eat.”
Much of My New Band Believe feels like a leveling-up of what Picton was inching toward on his Hellfire songs. “In The Blink Of An Eye” barrels in with all the rickety pomp of a fantasy call-to-action, eventually morphing into a full-on jig. The following eight-and-a-half-minute “Heart of Darkness” boasts early Kate Bush levels of precise theatricality and showcases the subtle malleability of Picton’s vocal deliveries, hacking up some of his consonant sounds and letting others snake around themselves on a show-stopping verse: “It’s such a long, long, long, long way to go / Through fields of hope / Forget the whisper trees / You’ll miss the hissing rope.” By the time “Heart of Darkness” arrives at its yawning, tinkering, wordless outro, all the story beats the song’s cycled through have rendered it almost unrecognizable, leaving the listener lost in the woods far from where they started the journey.
Just as easily as Picton and co. can rise to colossal heights of fantasy and Song Cycle levels of conceptuality, they can contrast them with the cutting immediacy of a track like “Opposite Teacher,” a quivering folk song about a child saddled with a secondhand shame that predates them, at once afraid of falling short of their parent’s expectations and repeating their parent’s mistakes without realizing. “I dream I’m running from a picture / of me in the twilight / I ask time, time knows not the answer / It follows and crushes,” Picton sings atop a steep slide of bowed strings, caught in the push and pull between the unknowns of a parent’s past and one’s own future. The following “Actress” is a harrowing dissection of celebrity and, more broadly, how destructive it can be to finally get what you want. “I envy you / You never tell the truth,” Picton sings, full of fascination and bitterness, admiration and indictment.
If there is a fault to be found in My New Band Believe, it’s in the record’s sequencing, which feels a bit too neatly segmented—like starting off with its most fantastical and high-energy tracks before slowing the momentum by putting two mellower ballads (“Love Story” and “Pearls”) back-to-back in the middle and ending on a trio of songs that, despite their grandeur, still feel rooted in realism. Closer “One Night,” while a gripping track about a fling that takes a violent turn, tapers off in the wake of its fizzy, electrifying chords and wavering violin, making for a somewhat curt end to the album.
All of these moving parts still make up a wonderful machine, and even when their placement is questionable, the end result is still a testament to Picton’s encompassing and uncompromising artistic vision and his capacity for brilliantly controlled collision—the Vaudeville hook pull of “Target Practice”; the third verse switch-up of “Love Story,” its soft-spoken everyday balladry suddenly imbued with the glow of danger on the horizon; the grand march of “Actress” that builds until the refrain of “I know you will” sounds almost like “I know you well” at its melodic peak. Entire lifetimes are stuffed into single lines. It’s thrilling to watch Picton come into his own as a composer and performer, to hear him remain steadfast in his unpredictability and at home in his unraveling. [Rough Trade]
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
