Anyone who last caught Liverpudlian trio Stealing Sheep in about 2011 is in for something of a surprise; back then they were a sort of Pentangle vs. Let’s Eat Grandma mash up of folk, rudimentary electronica and Wicker Man vibes. By their last album Not Real, they’d ditched the tie-dye and replaced it with an ultra-modern sound which scoped to the future rather than the past.
More than three years in the making, for Big Wows the band – Emily Lansley on bass, Luciana Mercer (drums) and Becca Hawley (keyboards & programming) – revealed that they began each song by creating loops and beats rather than working organically, an approach they felt suited the more dystopian themes it contains. It’s a precision tooling they describe as a ‘slow rush’, but like many daytime dreams their world of millennial crises of confidence is submerged in a near impermeable, hubristic mask, one the tweaked pop hooks and neat symmetry of their music knowingly sees from many different angles.
Most of the time, aside from the instrumental closer Heartbeats, their Trojan Horse is an ability to draw the listener in: on Back In Time they make an elegantly simple dish from a handful of synth notes and not much more, while the title track’s mellifluous disco is reminiscent of Hot Chip at their understated, dance-like-no-one’s-watching best.
This wringing of emotion from machines is one of the threesome’s obsessions, and they cite pioneering electronic composer Delia Derbyshire’s work with the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop as a major influence. Not bad for people who were speaking without irony about the neo-Pagan aspects to their music in the early stages of the decade.
Now finally having arrived in the future, Big Wows leaves experimentation to a minimum with the opener Show Love, Why Haven’t I and the effortless Breathe all gyrating in their fixed patterns, each as close to the safer radio playlist bracket as the other. There’s a slightly more fragmented introspection to Just Dreaming, but their vision is nailed on Jokin’ Me, a precision take which scans the ridiculous over-weighting we give to ourselves for being applauded by strangers in place of actually doing things. In this moment of anti-narcissism you feel they’ve smoked out a powerful truth, with everything previously not making sense suddenly making thumbs up sense.
Finding things you weren’t looking for is often music’s patron saint of over thinking though, so when the less obvious but frantically danceable skank of True Colours arrives it brings for the first time hedonism joyously to the yard, a reminder that sometimes just a groove is more than enough. This is the quandary Stealing Sheep find themselves in. A couple of albums ago they were a history lesson, now they’re on the brink of touching people with their mood rather than their message.
Big Wows could turn many new followers on to both, but to do so everyone involved may have to compromise.
