WEEKEND VIDEO
|
The Big Pink’s mission may just be to confuse us from the word go. When you name your band after the title of a record by Bob Dylan’s fellow travellers The Band, visions of pastoral, woozy folk-rock are only to be expected. The problem is, this is a very, very long way from what The Big Pink do.
Comprised of Robbie Furze and Milo Cordell, the Big Pink’s music looks not so much to The Basement Tapes as it does to the heady days of Manchester’s Hacienda, the squalling noise of My Bloody Valentine, and the droning, pharmaceutically-tinged space rock of Spiritualized.
Cordell runs the label Merok which put out the Klaxons and Crystal Castles, while Furze used to play guitar for Alec Empire (not the kind of guitar work you’re likely to hear on a Band record anytime soon).
Single “Dominos” has the air-punching dynamic of Happy Mondays with California tans or Babybird meeting MGMT, while “Too Young to Love” is a nightmarish squall a la Spaceman 3, yet with an aura like the Stone Roses had they embarked on a Krautrock odyssey, and “Velvet” takes those MBV comparisons to spellbinding places.
The debut album A Brief History of Love features contributions from SunnO)))’s Daniel Sullivan and backing vocals from Florence Welch and Patrick Wolf‘s sister, while Muse producer Rich Costey helped bring the album to life.
The Big Pink play the Reading and Leeds festivals and then take their noise pop hooks through Europe and the U.S. over the next few months. Expect all that Dylanesque confusion to disappear soon enough.