Asylums return with a renewed spring in their step.
Sometimes even if you have all the jigsaw pieces it just takes more to help you put them all together again.
A four-piece from Southend, Asylums have evolved considerably since the release of their debut Killer Brain Waves in 2016.
Between then and now they’ve built a roster of like-minded artists on their own Cool Thing Records label, releasing work by the likes of BLAB and A Cause in Distress whilst also running the bi-weekly radio show ‘Cool Thing Presents’, which airs both in London and New York on the Culture channel of Soho Radio.
However, the door to being so invested in a community swings both ways; the band’s Luke Branch has confessed that the motivation behind their fourth album was a total recognition that, ‘it’s been a rough few years for most people and for us the writing, rehearsing, arranging, recording and the design of this album has just been something positive to escape into. Making Signs Of Life was a total labour of love for us…we hope it brings a little joy to anyone who might hear it because it was a joy to make’.
What qualifies as joy is of course subjective, but the quartet have come across a formula that often matches nineties-tinged indie rock with bittersweet lyrics touching on ideas such as dislocation and the reality of twenties living.
If this sounds a bit less than joyous, Instant Coffee is a good place to begin weighing all this up. Branch sings, ‘All around me people start to frown/As our freedom disappears’, and yet the accompanying guitar jangle is almost perfect, the kind of ridiculously miserabilist pop of which the Manic Street Preachers are so capable of should they fancy it.
Perhaps one of the reasons for the likeness was because they worked with the Welsh trio’s producer Dave Eringa at Rockfield Studios, as well as garnishing their sound with drummer Henry Tyler’s string arrangements, and also piano, organ and what Eringa has described mysteriously as, ‘a bizarre interruption from Countryfile’.
Sometimes the confection of frustration and fractiousness gets the better of them, as on the harder boned de-scamming anthem Krypto Klepto, but in general whilst the feeling is very 21st century the vehicle lands firmly in the last decade of last century, with Say Goodbye Before You Die stained with the artsy glam of Suede, a quality like that heard on Spat Out The Other Side (Supergrass) and the kitchen sink closer The Mirror (The Bluetones).
If that’s to an extent the sincerest form of flattery then it’s not for clarity to Signs Of Life’s detriment, just you sense the group rediscovering a post-pandemic space for itself.
Opener Scatterbrain bottles all that discovery up and has the single take immediacy of a pitch headfirst into the unknown, whilst Understand The Psychology explores both loneliness and being alone as two sides of different coins.
But it’s Erase The Edges that gently exposes a side of Asylums music that’s more welcoming, a love song that never just falls to infatuation, but which for Branch and co. became, they say, the defining moment of their Rockfield tenancy.
On Signs Of Life, Asylums have pulled together the essence of themselves as they knew it before the world changed, and then made songs that offer new purpose.
Sometimes the jigsaw has a picture nobody could’ve recognised in the past.