Located about halfway between Manchester and Liverpool, Wigan is a fairly unassuming city of around 90,000 people, once a major mining center, but now completely devoid of functioning collieries. Tourists know it for its pier, its outdoor market, and its proximity to lots of rolling north English countryside, while dweebs like me know it as the epicenter of Britain's Northern Soul scene, and for turning out The Verve and Witness UK (not to mention bubblegummers Kajagoogoo)-- all in all, not a bad chart showing for such a small town. Well, now we can add hooky garage-rock to Wigan's extant mix of Northern Soul, majestic psychedelia, fizzy synth-pop, and stately Britannicana, courtesy of Moco.
Moco don't bear much resemblance to any of their hometown forebears, with a grimy sound worthy of those old boarded mining operations and a vocalist sure to have them labeled a North English Strokes. I'm not sure vocalist Steve Jones' timbrel similarity to Julian Casablancas is intentional, though; he seems to be making an effort to distance himself from the comparison with a delivery that's far more engaged and enthusiastic. However, producer Steve Kettle is doing him no favors by wrapping his voice up in Strokesian processing. Indeed, those little numbers up there at the top of the review would be a few ticks higher if Jones had just gotten to go off like the Iggy descendant he seems to have lurking in him.
For their part, the rest of the band sound like the kind of act that could flatten a crowd in a pub, with a canny sense of dynamics and arrangement. The guitars peel off riffs and drop them in your head's pop depository, and the band comes up with some clever turns in the middle of "Dirty Love", as the song veers into a frenetic march piled with xylophone, ooh-ing backing vox, and trumpet. The guitar hooks of "Baby When You Die" have a Rubber Soul quality to them, but the song's highlight is actually its midsection build-up and crashing return to the chorus. Songs are kept quick and to the point, with only one even flirting with the four-minute mark, and the album's half-hour total runtime makes it feel like a sugary punch in the arm-- it's not quite aggressive enough to knock your teeth out, but neither is it afraid to give you a decent bruising.
Ultimately, if Moco are to fully realize their potentially high ceiling, they'll have to step out from the garage a bit and allow themselves to be exposed as the fire-breathers they are behind the mask-- bassist Nick Higham and Simon Misra can bang, and I'd love to hear them shoved a little further in my face. But as it stands, this is all talk for another time, as Out to Go, for all its sonic shortcomings, nonetheless sticks mightily to your ribs.
