By the time roughly a third of Big Box Of Chocolates has passed, it begins to feel that its creators – the four cherubic sons of the Wirral named Hooton Tennis Club – are like a rubber ball, bouncing back to you.
Its opening trio of songs – Growing Concerns, Bootcut Jimmy The G and Bad Dream (Breakdown On St George’s Mount) – cement this notion, collectively full of cod-psychedelia, a diffident looseness and the loping good nature which were all reference characteristics of their début, the well received Highest Point In Cliff Town.
It’s an impression that masks both a change in circumstance and a very different approach to making music. The quartet, picked up by the Heavenly label after recording their first EP whilst still at university, found that in the decade with no name, blog buzz was all very well but record sales were much harder to come by. This phenomena is the paradox of being a modern musician; whilst limited fame is likely, limited earnings are more certain still.
Determined to carry on, they applied for a grant from the Momentum fund, a joint Arts Council and Performers Rights Society (PRS) vehicle set up to help sustain the careers of artists who might otherwise have had to go back prematurely to the call centre. The subsequent award helped them to shift the emphasis in recording approach, from doing as much as they could in two or three day bursts to securing time with the emblematic Edwyn Collins, alongside a residential at his Helmsdale studio complex in the welcoming Scottish Highlands.
Opportunities not many bands are privileged enough to have, and by the time Sit Like Ravi begins it finally sounds like HTC are set on making the most of them. From a modest start (a lazy chord or two, kitchen sink lyrics about all our little mores) the whole thing tightens up, finding gilt-edged purpose before exploding off into the Maharishi-bothering stratosphere, stupidly ambitious in comparison to what’s gone before it and the most eloquent proof yet that theirs is a collective talent deserving of wider attention.
Some things don’t change though. As before their cast of characters remains drawn from personal experience – the Katy-Anne Bellis of the title is an old flatmate – but like smelling salts, the startling effect of giving their craft space to breath is profound, sense-of-purpose in a bag. Both that and O Man Won’t You Melt Me? reveal a potential that lurked, but was only realised before in sporadic, slacker confusion; from this juxtaposition between trying too hard and not trying at all they also deal cards such as the pristine Lauren, I’m In Love! and the rootsy garage of the title track, each more hit than some of their old skool, slightly convoluted misses.
In the midst of the hype which surrounded their discovery HTC were lazily compared to, amongst other bands, the early Stone Roses, but Big Box Of Chocolates does them the great service of disabusing such millstones. Instead, they land somewhere between the mid-90’s alt.reverie of Pavement and the clearer shapes of Teenage Fanclub, the slopped out country of Frostbitten In Fen Ditton and Meet Me At The Molly Bench‘s discordant fuzz applying a further coat to their already well decorated groove machine.
There is an ongoing debate about the ever narrowing options of those who want to select music as a career – perhaps this is one of the major factors in its seemingly unstoppable coagulation, an art form stymied by entropy. It would be unreasonable to say Big Box of Chocolates might never have been made without philanthropy (people usually find a way) but the freedom given to Hooton Tennis Club on it has without question helped them push boundaries they’d probably have never realised.
In this maligned 21st century, it’s a rare good news story that we can celebrate with them.
