Album Review: 77:78 – Jellies


Jellies




There is a cynical thought someone invented (actually, it may have been us) that Britain has been trying to return to the 1960s ever since January 1st, 1970; what with Swinging London, Beatles and Stones and a sense of the radical briefly driving fashion, art and culture, it’s become easily the least understood but most fondly remembered decade of the island’s twentieth century.

Aaron Fletcher and Tim Parkin are nominally both still members of Isle of Wight collective The Bees, freewheeling sonic travellers who brought an artisan take to post-indie, their restless fingers into everything apart from that which you would expect.

Stranded on their eight-year hiatus since the group’s last full release Every Step’s A Yes, bored, frustrated or otherwise the pair have formed 77:78 as some sort of response to something, even if it’s just a simple desire to make music in public again.

Jellies is the result of four years in and out of the studio and, despite the sideways distractions of parenthood and domesticity, it’s an album the duo admit to being ‘chomping at the bit’ to release. This enthusiasm doesn’t so much spill over into the music as become its central theme, a loose vibe of pleased-to-be-hereness which oozes from every note of soulful opener If I’m Anything, its Moog swirls and Aquarian whooshes pinched enthusiastically from kitsch TV days of yore.

Self-described ‘crate diggers and music nuts’, Fletcher and Parkin spend at least some time fighting the tension between letting the obscurity go free and trying not to sound too clever, the afro-jazzy overtones Of Love Said (Let’s Go) and Poor It Out’s cosmic bits and bobs making a little out there feel weird in a cuddly and loveable way.

This adeptness at turning rare grooves into loveable things isn’t, you suspect, quite as randomly grown as it seems, but nevertheless the twosome remain limited by little other than the boundaries of their imagination. It’s a trip they clearly relish, the loopily Tex-mex fuzz of Chilli a glorious checking of heads, its sunset tones cueing them in as ‘the sort of 70’s dirty ol’ roadhouse blues band that we always wanted to be…dressed in double denim and playing in a desert bar where the chilli is hot as rockets’.

If this isn’t exactly role playing, it’s almost as if the music comes from a state of suspended animation, full of the sort of juiced Syd Barrett rabbit holes on closer Wagons that also barmily keynote the psychedelic splatterings of Liverpudlians The Fernweh. Only once – on Situations – are they guilty of trying too hard, but it’s when the pair use instinct that they really hit the mark, Shepherds Song an absolutely rolling shot at hope with a flotilla of rolling brass, while on Papers they mine enough Brill Building optimism, hooks and harmonies to lay a flowery glove on anyone’s consciousness.

There is no easy way to decode why we remain so obsessed with the sixties, a pseudo-golden musical age only ever recreated in scratchy caricatures. Aaron Fletcher and Tim Parkin have cannily chosen to fill their music with the love we blindly associate the period with, a universal truth which has at least survived our endless mind-meddling.

It makes Jellies a time capsule exhumed from right now, and an enjoyable all-ages show for anyone who believes there’s never any time but the present.



(Andy Peterson)


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