On the Internet, there is absolutely no shortage of writing that uses music as a starting point to discuss personal trauma, soul-searching and what it all means. Nostalgia and actual, factual history are now one, and this hazy middle ground between memory and reality has produced enough navel-gazing essays to save an entire generation of neurotic critics close to $65 billion in therapy bills. Nothing is more personal than our own lives. Nothing is less personal than our own lives. The Internet's made it a whole lot easier to explore and expose inner demons and a whole lot harder to create in a vacuum.
In Clapper Is Still, Way Through, the London-based duo of Christopher Tipton and Claire Titley, made a record with a completely transparent process that doesn't feel dashed off or incomplete. Each homespun song plots a course through England's history, from abandoned towns steeped in forgotten customs to the ghosts that haunt rolling green hills. On their website, the duo post a back story for each song. It's a hodgepodge of material, coming in the form of links, selfies taken in the places they're writing about, longer field recordings, mini write-ups that are loose but informative. It's all good information that glows with a real love for the subject matter, but it's not necessary to your enjoyment of the record, and often feels like an additional overwhelming layer to an already complicated album.
Take "Imber & Tyneham". Because of the information on their site, I know that it's about two villages that suffered vastly different fates after World War II. Tyneham became a "heritage destination amongst a still active army range" and Imber "remain[ed] strictly out of bounds training ground for urban combat." The song vibrates with chaos and constant upheaval, Tipton's guitar restlessly moves from staccato pound to blurry, damaged strumming that eventually gives way to a field recording of bells knocking together. Even without knowing those facts, there's a sense of military urgency to the song. It sounds like a frantic march.
Way Through describe themselves as "pastoral punk," and it's fitting. All of these songs are noisy but warm. "Roughting Linn" is upbeat and so thin you can virtually see all its moving parts, while "Haxey" is built on a pop-punk template, with a riff anthemic enough to be a Blink-182 castoff, except it's about something called "the Haxey Hood," which is a really old drinking game that involves throwing a leather hood in the direction of a village's public house. The custom has been around for close to 700 years. Not exactly the ode to teenage love that Tipton's riff tricks you into thinking it is.
The best moments on Clapper Is Still come when the idea of the concept is apparent, even if the backstory isn't. "Wharram Percy" begins with a car door slamming, Tipton and Titley's trip through their country's collective history is coming to an end. It's a strong emotional moment, a heavy sigh after a series of songs that have completely muddled the historical with the personal. Tipton sings pure ghostly desolation, evoking the eerie beauty of abandoned villages: "Powerlines flank, ditches and banks/An echo of a village, a melancholic margin/ You can relive everything." That last part feels like Tipton is laying out what he and Titley have been trying to do over the course of Clapper Is Still. We have, collectively, spent the last few years pulling inspiration from what we already know, but listen closely, Way Through are showing us a new approach.
