Album Review: LA Priest – GENE


Gene




History is sometimes a thing you can escape from easily, but Sam Eastgate’s relationship with the past keeps following him around, despite his present.

The man once known as Sam Dust, and more recently LA Priest, is now presenting his second album under the latter’s name, but the legacy of his first band Late Of The Pier remains stubbornly visible in the rear view mirror.

Four school friends barely out of their teens, the group’s Erol Alkan-produced debut and only release, Fantasy Black Channel, was at the time met with some bewilderment, a maverick bookend to the patchy and short lived nu rave movement. Over the last decade however, it’s gained the sort of rabid cache applied to Slint’s uber-cult foundling Spiderland, a constantly maturing reappraisal which could overshadow many a further career.

The first LA Priest album, Inji, had none of LOTP’s mania but plenty of arty discord, for GENE though Eastgate has again shifted his focus, this time from experimental funk and electronica to just experimental everything. Alkan joins him in the chair – the first time the two have worked together since the band split – but perhaps more tellingly the singer spent a year of between-record-downtime building his own drum machine from scratch, the name of which is the name of the album.

It’s an all-consuming type of project that inevitably has changed Eastgate’s approach to writing. GENE, it transpires, is less predictable in form and pattern than an off-the-shelf tool, Beginning a piece originally conceived more than a decade ago refreshed with a crisp, danceable modernity. The mix of personalities on show – like a sexed-down Prince somehow hanging out with Joe Mount – isn’t necessarily pervasive, but What Moves sounds like a soundtrack refugee from a lost Weirdest Cocktail Lounges…Ever pilot, while the loose knuckled What Do You See splices random eighties MOR with a (sort of) reggae lilt. Almost.

Inji had an element of mischief in play (or avant-garde, whichever you prefer) and that streak is in evidence again: under the ‘normal’ banner, Killing Of The Weeds is the sort of techno melancholia Thom Yorke has carved a niche in, while the lounge thrust of Peace Lily is sweet rather than absorbing. But then, as lucidity starts to escape, closer Ain’t No Love Affair is a noisy mesh of feedback and scraping frequencies, following Monochrome, which resembles several tracks running together simultaneously.

Almost lost amongst the inessentials – circuit board level plans, etc – GENE confirms what was obvious twelve years ago: that in Sam Eastgate we hear a complicated talent whose gift for becoming distracted results in work too singular for categorisation. It’s a series of episodes from which any commonality only emerges with effort, an unconscious dismissal of the instant hit culture of now.

His back now turned to the mainstream, where next is a thought provoking question.



6.5/10

Andy Peterson


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