It's perfectly reasonable to want to dismiss new projects led by David Gedge. Hell, at this point, he seems damn near anachronistic, reeking of floppy canvas sneakers and backwards baseball caps and songs about girls and inoffensively distorted guitars. Gedge fronted the long-also-running UK group the Wedding Present for 12 years, patenting a strummy, light-angst sound that was frustratingly difficult to take seriously, despite the craft and quality concealed in their best work.
The Wedding Present legendarily shoved early Pavement buzz into high gear with their b-side cover of "Box Elder," and no less an authority than Steve Albini deemed them "nice enough to date your sister." Couple that with a brace of songs that define the mid-'90s non-twee pop aesthetic, and the race is over: in a quiet, continually underplayed, terminally unhip way, the Wedding Present stand as possibly the most important U.K. indie-pop act of the decade. Though Madchester bands and shoegazers often pick up the most dap for such achievements, the Wedding Present delivered more quality for a longer period than your favorite Limeytalk-spouting heroes could dream of.
The Wedding Present have apparently folded, having maintained a resolute four-year silence, and Gedge has recouped with Cinerama. The band still features Gedge's endearingly froggy vocals jousting with their self-consciously "cute"-voiced foil, keyboardist Sally Murrell. The songs still revolve around banal/timeless troubles of the heart, though the driving forces are still so defiantly pro-craft, pro-pop and anti-experimentation that it makes one wonder where Gedge does his record shopping. It's as if the man's never heard hip-hop, jungle, free jazz or any of the other rock-band additives du jour.
Gedge has, however, definitely heard of Portishead. Either that, or he's a closet '60s-exotica soundtrack fan. Cinerama spike the dorkcore stylings of their frontman with heavy doses of tinkly cocktail Moog, smatterings of wah-wah guitar, and chilly Serge Gainsbourg arrangements. Once again, starting a trip hop-inflected pop band in A.D. 1998 is hardly cutting edge, but hipster cred has never been Gedge's principle motivation.
Though the band's long-players, Va Va Voom and the near-fabulous Disco Volante, have been quite cool, any longtime Gedgeophile can tell you the real story of the man's work is in the singles. This is Cinerama studiously compiles the first slew of less-than-12" action by the group, and keeps the winning streak going.
"Kerry Kerry" kicks things off with a slab of affable, acoustic pop, but the song's b-side, "Love," really gets things going. Over a bed of the funkiest guitar a SpinArt recording artist's ever mustered, and a fugue of keyboard lines, Gedge sings of the titular subject while the Delgados' Emma Pollock circles him with gorgeous, sweeping harmonies. "Manhattan" clocks in at a relatively epic five minutes, and it's a crowning example of Cinerama's more atmospheric approach. There's barely any guitar on the track, the melody sounds played on a synthetic harpsichord, and sampled horns build to the chorus. Where most groups who traffic in such aesthetic oddities are content to congratulate themselves for figuring out ProTools, Gedge's rock-solid pop instincts smoothly integrate such atmosphere into yet another love-gone-wrong standard. The insertion is so seamless, it becomes hard to remember there's anything remotely odd going on at all.
So, no, Gedge's new atmospheric palette hasn't taken him far from his favorite, untimely concerns. He hasn't suddenly embraced Marxism, Hegelian dialectics or post-structuralism. He's still talking about love and sorrow, growing old when you still feel like a child. None of these social problems are as au courant as the WTO or the death of language, but they'll never be irrelevant, either. Somebody's got to keep a handle on this stuff, and who does it better than this?
