Each Hood album seems to contain at least one single whose first minute sounds like the work of a band that is poised to take over the world, a casually brilliant combination of living-room sound and electronic future-think that trounces everything you've heard in months. This time around it's a track called "The Lost You": An airy shard of a sample stutters and slices itself open into a big, lurching beat, the vocal comes muttering modestly in along with it, and by the time the song fleshes itself out into a chorus you're wide-eyed and wondering why every band can't be this carelessly awesome. It's at moments like this that Hood seems like the greatest thing ever: A band making the kind of Serious Innovative Music people like to imagine Radiohead are, only without a hint that they know or care that they're doing it at all. String together a tight, accessible collection of glorious moments like this, and there's hardly a critic on either side of the Atlantic who wouldn't clamor to cast these guys as the new saviors of music.
Only there's a catch: That's not really the kind of band this is. It's not that a track like "The Lost You" is so different from the rest of their work-- and it's not that there's anything about the songs around it that's sub-par-- it's just that they're really not interested in glory. Recent Hood recordings have less to do with grand pop gestures than with the kind of wandering pastoralia perfected by the Bristol act Movietone: Sometimes they just want to camp out in a room with acoustic guitar and violin and delay pedals and see how a song crawls into shape on its own. Instead of big-budget drama, Hood are reminiscent of the drifting sound-paintings of Bark Psychosis, Disco Inferno, or Slowdive's final record. Sometimes the song framework takes a back seat to letting dense arrangements of guitar and piano echo around one another.
Hood's previous full-length, Cold House, still made gestures toward crisp, cohesive pop, but Outside Closer gets pretty comfortable with the feeling of sprawl. The result is a whole load of cold-sun-on-moors, last-leaves-on-the-tree material. But what's remarkable is that instead of sounding autumnal and frigid, the bulk of this album has a warmth, an emotional weight, and a sense of underlying motion that competes damn well against the occasional fireworks. Some of these pleasures may be subtle or take time to grasp, but the sinking-in is gorgeous and worth the wait.
This, in fact, may be as good as Hood have ever been at letting songwriting and sprawl play off of one another-- even though their electronic tweaks back away and the violin takes a larger role. You'd still need the mind of a musicologist to be able to hum some of these wandering melodies and sleepy English mumbles, but that doesn't make them any harder to take in: Even the most lethargic of them-- seven minutes of slow burn on "Closure" and "Any Hopeful Thoughts Arrive"-- gradually gather into something narrative, ballads recast in an impressionist haze.
When they aim for shape, there's still the same sense of variation and sprawl around the edges: The terrific "The Negatives" weaves samples, strings, and acoustics into a fine-tuned depth that's almost reminiscent of the Church, but it flows along according to a logic that's anything but conventional. What's most striking here depends on what you're in it for. "Still Rain Fell" is a big pastoral wash of acoustic guitars and violin melody that casts this band as a set of sophisticated pop songwriters-- this is the kind of relaxed, languorous sound that makes it feel like Hood are conceiving their material late at night in someone's living room. On the other hand, there are "Winter 72"-- which actually does cross into the dubbed-out full-band headspace of Bark Psychosis-- and "This is It, Forever", which reduces the whole band into a momentary sound-art mutter.
It's unknown whether or not that title is a hint the band is going to call it a day. This Leeds collective has been floating through various kinds of gorgeousness for just over a decade, more or less improving with every release; they've also already tried breaking up, but without success. It's not really clear whether that mutter of a send-off genuinely marks the end for Hood, but if it does, this record is a bit of a conflicted curtain: A captivatingly strong release that still leaves you wondering if these guys have a world-conquering album somewhere inside them.
