Mush’s new album is Leeds but not as we know it.
Being in a band from Leeds isn’t easy.
As much as outsiders like to bracket anyone from the city into either the indie landfill or post-goth bracket, 90% of the local scene remains defiantly underground, not really arsed mate about yer showcase gigs and London Tik Tokers.
Added to this, it’s a place that’s big enough to hide in but where most people know somebody who knows everybody else, and those folk keep receipts. A West Yorkshire utopia it ain’t.
Formed in 2015, Mush are from the ‘motorway city’ – as it once proudly described itself – but don’t fit neatly into any into anyone’s box; awkwardly post-punk but in a less orthodox way than fellow Loiners (relax, it’s what people from an LS postcode are known as) Yard Act, their first two albums – 2020’s 3D and the following year’s Lines Redacted – saw a wonky, slightly out of tune rendering most obviously in thrall to Pavement, but also of their modern disciples Squid and the recently departed Cabbage.
I Predict A Riot they were not.
Down Tools is the stuff of a group who’ve had some things to process; weeks before Lines Redacted was released guitarist Steven Tyson died, and it’s certainly not like the world’s got any kinder since.
Accordingly, singer Dan Hyndman had admitted that whilst grief was integral to the writing process, this third time lucky is, ‘Less dark than the previous one. The Armageddon obsession has eased, or at least the symptoms have become milder due to saturation’.
The band’s Sgt. Pepper, then? No, but there are times where you can hear the joins better, Burn, Suffering! sounding like early Beck if he’d been brought up in Headingley on a diet of Trout Mask Replica, whilst the title-track meanders like weed smoke before dissolving suddenly into atonal white noise, a wakeup call for people already listening.
Part of the explanation is that Hyndman and co. were given license to go wherever they wanted, returning to Greenmount Studios (which is in you guessed it), and working with familiar collaborators Lee Smith and Jamie Lockhart.
Therefore, if a lot of Down Tools sounds like it was made up on the spot in the studio – for instance during the abstract guitar solo of Get On Yer Soapbox – it’s because some of it quite deliberately was.
Back to that clutching at the straws of real life then, there are things to be talked about that we need to talk about; Northern Safari – a yapping, itchy almost pop number – takes aim at southern media making northern people sound like fools on the telly because it suits them, whilst Group Of Death is supposedly modelled on Paul McCartney and even less likely, could be the year’s most unlikely tilt at an unofficial World Cup theme.
If there’s an uncomfortable truth about that, then equally there’s a blankness to the ways people who are meant to defend our dignity sometimes victimise the victims; Human Resources navigates through the rubble of trying to do good (‘I joined the whistle blowers’ choir’) when it ends up backfiring.
Musically, the peak however is left to the MBV noise bound glow of Inkblot And The Wedge, a part played straight and played by an outfit who can play it that way if, y’know, it’s what you really want.
That’s the gig with being from Leeds; things are rarely how you see them from the outside because nobody inside wants it to be that way.
Down Tools does cares a lot about what you think, but not enough to change because of it.
