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Note: Jackets have some light corner damage from international shipping.
Marcel Wave write eulogies for tragic actresses, ancient riverbeds and concrete obscenity. Their inaugural sonic instalment ‘Something Looming’ is part trades club symphony, part itchy serenade, and part wistful lament. As their heady concoction of ‘Meades meets Pat-E-Smith meets Kirklees Borough Council’ gets prepped to be formally baptised on a dank stage near you, Upset the Rhythm and Feel It Records have dutifully stepped in to deliver its songbook to the masses on both sides of the pond.
Formed when Lindsay Corstorphine and Christopher Murphy of Sauna Youth and brethren Oliver and Patrick Fisher of Cold Pumas were summoned by northern ink-slinger Maike Hale-Jones, Marcel Wave’s debut offering is a walk through a smoke-filled pub with yellowing wallpaper and all eyes on you. It’s a chronicle of the death of the docklands, the decline of industry, of the high street, of civic pride, of civilisations, of hopes and dreams. As Hale-Jones delivers the bad news in her low, West Yorkshire brogue, Corstorphine adds the bells and whistles via the frantic pulsations of a wheezing Hohner organ in tandem with Fisher O’s rasping guitar. MW are completed by the throbbing basslines of Murphy and Fisher P’s fervent rhythms.
The title itself sets the tone for the listener. There’s a sense of foreboding in Hale-Jones’ lyrics which sit at the quintet’s core—elegiac, sardonic and piquant in equal measure. A mixture of narrative epilogues and inward paeans, her words weave tales across a broad thematic church. Crooked tales of urban renewal and the voices left behind are probed in ‘Barrow Boys’ and ‘Stop/Continue’ and are at the fore in ‘Where There’s Muck There’s Brass’ with its refrain lamenting ‘Concrete and slate shine in the rain, cities destroyed, nothing to gain’. In these lyrics, tower blocks loom over terraced houses with the same shadows that the Hollywood sign casts over Peg Entwistle before she takes her tragic leap. ‘Peg’ and ‘Elsie’ are both meditations on two different actresses with different fates crushed by the cut-throat trappings of showbusiness: ‘The mad hopes break, fragile as glass. She traded it all, for the cutting room floor.’ A snaking, existential dread also runs through the album, stated more obliquely in the otherwise poppier interludes of the title track ‘Something Looming’ and album opener ‘Bent Out of Shape’, and present too on the comparatively ramshackle ‘Discount Centre’, where Hale-Jones reports ‘On a mini bus on the outskirts of Enfield, I’m losing all of my spark’. On the album closing weeper ‘Linoleum Floor’, it is laid barer still—a keyboard-led reflection on the deflating nights out of our early-twenties.
Marcel Wave invites the listener to dance to society’s decline, and then to later weep into its lukewarm pint.
Our take: Marcel Wave is a new UK group featuring a couple of folks from Sauna Youth and a couple of other folks from Cold Pumas backing up lyricist and vocalist Maike Hale-Jones. A quick Google tells me Hale-Jones is a screenwriter for their day job, which makes sense as Marcel Wave’s songs have a writerly flair, with a vividness to the lyrics that’s a cut well above your standard DIY punk fare. The lyrics are striking whether they’re character studies like “Peg” or “Elsie,” social critiques like “Great British High Street,” or more traditional-ish tales of misspent youth like “Something Looming” and “Linoleum Floor.” Something Looming also has a strong sense of setting, its cover artwork perfectly capturing the tar-stained pub back room ambience that runs through the entire album. As for the music, it borrows some of its aesthetic from the early Rough Trade catalog, with layers of simple melodies coalescing into a psychedelic swirl, but the recording is crisp, bright, and modern, which suits the ongoing dialog between past and present that is a recurring motif in the lyrics. And fans of the Fall’s early records are gonna hear a lot they love in those great organ lines. Something Looming is a really fantastic album, and while it’s bound to catch the ear of anyone into contemporary post-punk-influenced music, its distinctive lyrics make it stand out from a crowded field of very good bands.