Inside Your Guitar

Sometimes music just fits a very particular mood and can be the overall appeal for that music. Sometimes it’s drugs. If you’re on drugs, you tend to like very particular music. Say, maybe, dance music and rock music, again depending on what particular drug. Drinking too. Every one gets very snobby and picky when drunk. Some I know love big 80s power ballads, others Radiohead to help fall into those pints, drown their sorrows figuratively and so forth. Some, oddly enough, love country music, Gram Parsons and Williams, even Parton. When sober though, they reflect hastily on this and always, literally always, shake their heads in a type of self-mooring knowledge that sober, they would never ever listen to such repetitive twanging. Not in a million sober years. But there would never be a million sober years, not as much as one single sober year so they knew deep down that they would inevitably end up listening to country music at some stage again. This creature burrowed himself deep and waited.

Well, It Hugs Back fits into a particular mood as well. If one wanted to relax, do nothing, get high or was possibly sick on a day off from work or school, or even hungover, the band’s debut Inside Your Guitar is the perfect medicine. Imagine all the cozy loveliness of Yo La Tengo and Stereolab, and filter it through with lapping, slapping trembley guitars and little crashing drum beats and ever so slight bass notes and you’ve got this little gem.

Each track folds into the next with Matthew Simms’ voice whispering reassuringly along the way. His voice guides like Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, but without any screaming or carnage. The opening ‘Q’ sets the tone for a pop-licked ambience. It sounds all very new-age but really it works. It’s great. The second track ‘Work Day’ has some glorious chord changes. ‘Don’t Know’ is sprinkled with a tiny little organ riff that rears up and down throughout. ‘Soon’ is wonderful and floaty and with ‘Back Down’ one can hear slices of Spiritualized. From about track nine on, the album picks up and lets loose a bit, which, to be honest, is necessary. Eleven of these calm tracks might have been just too much. Instead the closing tracks elevate the album at just the right time and add a new string to its bow. Not that the first eight were flat-line boring. They had life alright and they bounced but the tempo just needed to be brought up a notch. And it was. A sure sign these lads from Kent know exactly what they are doing.

So it was all a bit like a pleasant daydreaming nap on a summers day maybe out on the grass with some cider and a book? Yes, it was. And excellent for it too. This debut is certainly bigger than the sum of its many wistful intricate parts. A beautiful and lively album.