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Black Submarine\u2019s eponymous debut album unites five veteran agents of the spectacle at the height of their powers. As the name suggests, these musicians operate in subsurface currents, with songs that prowl a listener\u2019s brain stem long after the needle is lifted and reality resumed.<\/p>\n
The project began in 2008, after Nick McCabe and Simon Jones asked Davide Rossi to provide string parts for The Verve\u2019s Forth, midway through that band\u2019s tumultuous reunion and the year of their totemic Glastonbury headline slot. Striking a common vein of pop sensibility and grander, soundtrack-influenced ambitions upon first meeting, the three continued to share inspiration as Rossi came out on tour with the band. The electric violinist, tutored by such luminaries as Stockhausen, Ivan Krivensky and Robert Fripp, came to prominence with his work for Alicia Keys, Lee Hazelwood and Goldfrapp, and had recently given Coldplay\u2019s Viva la Vida and Mylo Xyloto some of their richest and most affecting moments.<\/p>\n
The trio enlisted ex-Portishead\/Santa Cruz drummer and Bristol scene mainstay Michele \u2018Mig\u2019 Schillace, a longtime friend who they\u2019d worked with in Field Theory, and flew to Denmark in Winter 2009. Feeling \u201cabsolutely fucking freezing\u201d but focused and excited, McCabe says, the band wondered the haunted grandeur of Copenhagen, visiting its churches, making field recordings that have wound their way into the album, and recording each day.<\/p>\n
Back in the UK, Schillace had been managing dynamite Bristolian singer Amelia Tucker, a serendipitous compliment to Rossi\u2019s sandblasted baritone. Blown away by the top line she gave \u2018Here So Rain,\u2019 the second track on the album, the band switched from a Massive Attack-inspired rotating vocalist arrangement to incorporate Tucker as a fulltime member.<\/p>\n
In the following months, the five passed stems between their home set ups, with Tucker working into the material the band had generated in Denmark, refining its extended jams into a crystalline hybrid of soundscape and pop song. A year later, they reconvened in McCabe\u2019s studio on the Walworth Road in Elephant and Castle, an ex-Victorian post office, with a communal live room at its centre surrounded by repurposed sorting offices.<\/p>\n
Tucker and McCabe would enter this rabbit warren to sit down with the monitors blaring, going over the mixes, well-supplied with tea and biscuits, and surrounded by stockpiled machines and sonic paraphernalia. \u201cIt\u2019s full of stuff, like an Aladdin\u2019s cave of stuff,\u201d Tucker remembers, \u201cIt\u2019s really bad, he definitely feeds my addiction to recording gear.\u201d The best material was hewn collectively into song structures, perforated by mercurial, Debussian strings, and worked upon further by the band before being sent to Jim Spencer (Robert Wyatt, Echo & The Bunnymen, Factory Floor, Oasis) to be mixed.<\/p>\n
Though it\u2019s Black Submarine\u2019s spaced-out vocals, deep beats and molten soundscapes that retain a vice-like hold on first listen, the heart of this LP is in Rossi\u2019s string arrangements. They parse the album\u2019s 10 songs together, sustaining its climaxes, their celestial mechanics turning \u2018Heavy Day\u2019 and \u2018The Love in Me\u2019 into full-colour dopamine explosions. They match pound-for-pound Simon Jones\u2019 rolling bass-lines, McCabe\u2019s meditative chord sequences and cavernous electronics, and are left hanging in suspended animation whenever these thick layers of songwriting evaporate.<\/p>\n
Opener \u2018Black Submarine\u2019 snatches a quick breath of this haunted instrumentation before post-industrial acid low-end blisters into the foreground, supporting mantra-like vocals. It\u2019s a markedly ominous, almost brutal arrival. Conditions were briefly inclement, with the band weathering legal vexation after they released the Kurofune EP as Black Ships. Perhaps that\u2019s the source of an angst and malevolence cheek-by-jowl here with the record\u2019s sweeter moments. The shaded half of their sound recalls the reconstituted smack Jazz of Portishead and Bristol sound acts, resurrected in recent years by the likes of Flying Lotus and Atoms For Peace. It\u2019s a permutation of the music that surrounded them in their early careers, made relevant again by a new period of physical-digital upheaval and the contemporary hybridization of EDM, hip-hop and pop.<\/p>\n
The record covers vast terrain and incorporates polar contrasts however, brining effects laden, Moby-via-Morricone soundtrack experimentation juddering into a disquiet accord with accomplished songwriting, the side that may be more familiar to fans of Jones and McCabe\u2019s earlier material. In particular there is a sonic tie to the latter\u2019s work with John Martyn; Black Submarine recently contributed a break beat inflected \u2018Rope Soul\u2019d\u2019 to a Martyn tribute record, audible\u00a0here.<\/p>\n
Featuring a vocal turn by 20 year-old Elly McCabe, \u2018Lover\u2019 pinpoints exactly this mellifluous territory, as does the standout \u2018Heart First\u2019, a 6 minute symphonic rapture that unleashes Amelia Tucker\u2019s lungs:<\/p>\n
\u201cJump out jump in to the end of what you knew\/Take a breath and leave your self behind you\u201d<\/p>\n
Always intending the band to be a self-sufficient affair, with total creative freedom, they had soon realized that,despite the well-documented gripes to be had with major labels, producing a full and finalized project, without risking the potential creative paralysis of a big advance, and without any sort of team around them, was something of a Herculean challenge. Determined to pull something new and original together despite lives and careers in full flight, they slyly subverted their \u2018Ships\u2019 moniker and signed to Kobalt. Luckily, and of interest to any exploitation cinema fans, help had come unexpectedly when the band landed the soundtrack for a Mickey Rourke movie, \u2018Java Heat,\u2019 a B-movie shrapnel fest and cult hit where it\u2019s set in Indonesia. Using their thoroughly modern process, all five members worked and shared music remotely, each having a hand in its construction while never once being all in the same room. With the proceeds, they could finance the whole LP themselves and achieve the self-sufficiency they had set out for.<\/p>\n
It paid off handsomely. These 10 songs, darked out missives pitched in the nether-space between early morning and daybreak, between screen and mind, seep out around the edges of the record, achieving a remarkable psychoactive subterfuge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Black Submarine\u2019s eponymous debut album unites five veteran agents of the spectacle at the height of their powers. As the name suggests, these musicians operate in subsurface currents, with songs that prowl a listener\u2019s brain stem long after the needle is lifted and reality resumed. The project began in 2008, after Nick McCabe and Simon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blacksubmarine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blacksubmarine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blacksubmarine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blacksubmarine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blacksubmarine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blacksubmarine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69,"href":"http:\/\/blacksubmarine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64\/revisions\/69"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blacksubmarine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}