If it seems like a slightly dangerous cultural reality that there’s a limit to how commercially big certain bands can get, thank god the same idea doesn’t apply to how good they can get.
Hookworms have been evolving their bewitching post-psychedelia since 2013’s debut Pearl Mystic and its deeper, labyrinthine follow up The Hum, released the following year. The Leeds quintet are almost by definition cast from angles which are oblique but fascinatingly deep, known to outsiders only by their initials but inspiring a sort of obsessiveness amongst fans that puts an unspoken pressure on them to recognise with always more crafted music.
Microshift will fulfill that need for ever increasing circles – for some at least. A band notoriously shy of the industry’s machine, its three-year gestation period is due more than in part to the flooding of singer MJ’s home studio (an event dealt with at least tangentially here on the abrasive Boxing Day) but also because of a desire to open up, one which has now driven them to rely less on freewheeling as the finished article but instead concentrating their energy on a shift towards this new material being more song based.
The result is a record that comes, for the first time, from the studio-as-instrument perspective, a bricolage of elements formed out of loops, modular synthesizer sequences, drum machines and DIY sampling. At times the contrast is startling, a leap revealed on the ersatz techno of Negative Space, itself a musing on death – “A cruel mistake/I can’t believe it/Who can I trust/Now that you’re not breathing? – that starts with the singer breathless with the onset of a panic attack but ends with a waterfall of noise and a post Balearic sensation of warmth and celebration rather than mourning.
It’s by no means alone in dealing with hard subject matter amongst songs which parse topics as uncomfortable as body image, disease and relationship breakdown. But if the mask is a familiar one, the music is a vessel towards catharsis, in possession of a deep emotional resonance heard for instance on Opener’s euphoric swell, its motorik beats and cascading organ nodding, as does much of Microshift, to My Girls-era Animal Collective.
As if the trauma which preceded it was a wiping of some invisible slate, the disasters both natural and personal which inform everything here surprisingly seem to open up a door to simple hedonism. Static Resistance is a rock and roll song at face value, MJ piling through various identities during it from glam rock charlatan to confessional minister, whilst Each Time We Pass reaches out to touch with some of the disarming naivete much beloved of Hot Chip. As if to emphasise the break with what’s gone before, closer Shortcomings is almost benign, disarmingly free from the complex mania of the band’s joint past.
Microshift, it seems, is a record about confrontation, but without the anger. With its embracing of humanity the escape hatch of clinging to fuzzy obfuscation is gone, but instead we have a big little band growing through empathy and intelligence, a gift of sacrifice which should be paid forward.
Hookworms can be what they want to be. Envy them, a little.
