Is it electronica chopped up into pop songs? Or a collection of hookless pop that props up gorgeous electronic effects? It's hard to be absolutely certain, but I can tell you one thing: for all the work that went into their debut, British band South failed to fully deliver on their hype. Sad, too, because From Here On In is inches away from being a success. It's just that it's weighed down by so many repetitive textures and songs that fail to impact.
Joel Cadbury handles most of the vocals and routinely swaps drums, bass, keyboards and guitar with Brett Shaw and Jamie McDonald. And on a few of these tracks, they make a straightforward Brit-pop combo. You can hear echoes of some 90s Manchester bands like the Stone Roses and possibly a less glamour-stricken Suede, and the piano and vocals-- particularly on "Keep Close"-- are reminiscent of John Lennon (or at least Julian). But the guys only turn out one solid rock song, the orchestral "Paint the Silence," and the appealing but derivative "Here On In." The latter, a summer-day power ballad with acoustic guitars and pastoral keyboards, builds to a beautiful, aching climax while Cadbury intones the chorus, surrounded by smashed drumkits and mangled guitars. With songs like this, South has the potential to be a great bliss-pop band.
But pop isn't enough for South, and when they hit the studio, things got a little crazy. South co-produced the album with James Lavelle, the head of acid jazz label Mo'Wax (which released From Here On In in Britain) and the man behind U.N.K.L.E.; he collaborated with DJ Shadow on the 1998 hit Psyence Fiction, an album widely recognized for sounding great but not actually being great. But, possibly due to Lavelle's influence, or maybe their own excessive facility in the studio, South was a bit liberal with the sounds and effects on this album, and not necessarily in a good way. In fact, many of these songs mercilessly work a beat without ever taking it anywhere.
The instrumentals have a driven pace, but they end up as static "variations on a groove," if you'll pardon my soul-professor terminology. South includes three separate versions of "Broken Head," each longer and less interesting than the last. "All In for Nothing (Reprise)" kicks off with a terrific drumbeat and soaring keyboards (or guitars?), but loses its effect after stagnating for the remaining four minutes. Many of the pop songs are also drowned with texture: "All in for Nothing" becomes vague and indistinct as the band turns it into a canvas for the beats and keyboards. Even some of the simpler songs suffer from a short attention span. "Keep Close" already works as a straightforward song, but the guys can't resist the urge to play with the vocal mix or tack a gloomy instrumental onto the end.
This is even more unfortunate considering that the band actually sounds terrific. The drumming is crisp and limber, and I can't get enough of their basslines. Occasionally, they hit a song with everything they've got and it all comes together: "Sight of Me" segues well from the slower body of the song to a solid dance outro. But the overall impression is of long stretches with little to warrant attention; the arrangements are muddied by too many textures and the tracklist relies too heavily on dirges, such as the back-to-back woe of "Recovered Now," "Southern Climes" and "By the Time You Catch Your Heart." With a running time of seventy minutes, all the good parts get buried.
Last year, South worked with Lavelle on the soundtrack to Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast, and if you've seen the film, you've heard the stuff South excels at: slightly lo-fi atmospheric music that's great in small doses and works well behind scenes of criminals breaking into vaults and dreaming about hairy monsters. But the best musical moment of that film comes from punk band the Stranglers, during the title sequence: there's a shot of Ray Winstone, several pounds overweight with his leathery, bare gut hanging out over tight Speedos, stumbling next to the pool. As his groin hangs in the middle of the screen for way, way too long, the Stranglers play a little song called "Peaches" whose concise drums and raunchy organ mocks the scene perfectly. If South had pushed themselves to make one great moment like that, or really anything that evokes images of Ray's fleshy thigh, we might have had something a little stickier on our hands.
