Ever driven a car at night through winding country lanes? The canopy of touching trees overhead illuminated only by the headlights so that you feel as if you're hurtling headlong into an endless wicker womb? No? Just me? Well one of the boons of not being able to drive and being almost constantly drunk is that you get time to look out of the window and let your mind wander. And while you sober uptight motorists are being pushed and prodded along by your sat-nags I, ungrateful passenger and inept navigator, only have to listen to music and dream. And that's what the opening track of the Zephyr's brilliant new album "Creative Faith" suggests to me. It's a huge warm cocoon of a song, both sad and epic, underpinned with a motorokin' beat and shot through with blue and purple flashes of psychedelic guitar. It's a wonderful introduction to the record.
"Wet Outside Dry in Here" is next up, with its lush Beach Boys harmonies and wistful 60's organ, courtesy of Mogwai's Barry Burns. Gruff Rhys and Lisa Jen Brown add their voices too and in truth the song wouldn't sound out of place on a Super Furries album. Things take a turn for the idiosyncratic with "The Lonely Trekker" and one of the major themes of the album is unveiled - it is the cri de coeur of an office worker who hates the mundanity of his life, raised against an amazing backing of clunking electronics and prettily phased guitars. "Ransom" has a country twang and there is something "Seedsy" (not seedy) about the guitar line that snakes through it, but its most obvious debt is to the Velvet Underground, with its tub-thumping drums and wall of electric noise.
"Recruitment Agency" is a bluesy lament about updating your C.V. with a rythmn track that sounds like someone carefully munching through a packet of crisps and "Rip the Heart" is beautifully melodic love-song built around the exchange of Hammond organ and a shimmering liquid guitar line. "Automatic" is a synthy rocker with the title running through it like a stick of rock: a stick of technorock. "Sole in the Machine" is a huge lumbering groove that will end up as the theme tune a critically acclaimed H.B.O. cop show and make them all millionaires.
Time to give up the day jobs.
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