North Atlantic Oscillation - Grappling Hooks
Review by Jack Foley
HOPES have been high for North Atlantic Oscillation ever since they delivered their excellent debut EP, Callsigns, and then followed it up with the equally exciting single Drawing Maps From Memory.
Alas, now that the debut album, Grappling Hooks, has arrived there’s a bitter sense of disappointment.
While certainly embracing of NAO’s philosophy of non-conformity and constantly evolving soundscapes, the LP fails to gel as a truly satisfying whole.
True, the sound is something akin to what might happen if the band members of Super Furry Animals, The Flaming Lips, Sigur Ros and Grandaddy got together… but quite often the tracks lack any real form or coherence. Rather, the sound feels more like a self-indulgent jamming session, to which the listener hasn’t really been invited.
They’re clever enough to include some obviously radio friendly moments… such as the aforementioned Drawing Maps From Memory, which still shines.
But they are the exception, rather than the norm and – for once – I find myself lamenting the lack of something a little more familiar, or at least structured. Drawing Maps.. does, at least, hark back to a Teenage Fanclub style of progression indie-rock.
But efforts such as Marrow, which kick-start the album, never really get going in satisfying fashion, dividing their time between emphatic beats and guitar flourishes, with wailed, barely audible vocals adding to the distorted, and eventually annoying, effect.
Hollywood Has Ended, meanwhile, begins in deceptively hazy fashion, suggesting a comedown moment of lazy tranquillity, before suddenly unleashing an electro-pulse backbeat and frenzied Hammond organs that obliterate the goodwill it had previously generated.
Prog sensibilities reverberate around Cell Count, meanwhile, and Audio Plastic hits you with wave after wave of stop-start reverb. But it never really finds a satisfying groove.
Occasionally, however, they do hook it up and get things right. The single, for instance, or Alexanderplatz and Ritual, which is chock-full of cute glockenspiel beats and kooky/trippy tendencies.
It’s just a shame there’s not more of such moments. NAO, for all their creative ambition, need a little more order to go with it.
Download picks: Alexanderplatz, Ritual, Drawing Maps From Memory
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