LONDON CLAY – Private View

There’s undeniably a certain kind of environment conjured up by the music of London Clay: drab municipal housing schemes; concrete walkways; a parade of shops in a post-war suburb; an underpass running underneath a dual carriageway; decaying social housing stock; the shadows of new build blocks for young professionals falling across the ever changing landscape. When they sing “tarmac shimmers, no future plans” you can feel this sense of place pressing in on the songs, shaping the melodies like they’re harmonising with the wind blowing through scaffolding sheets, the rhythms reflecting the sound of jackhammers and wrecking balls. This description perhaps makes their music sound somewhat uninviting, and whilst it is suffused with a certain amount of urban claustrophobia and late night paranoia, there’s also a lightness of touch that illuminates the dark corners – the gentle tone of a human voice and memorable repeating keyboard motifs offsetting the industrial chug. And whilst you can locate this music on a broad spectrum of post-punk (that most malleable and co-opted of genre terms), particularly the sounds of early 1980s Sheffield, there’s a more varied sonic palette at play than that might suggest. At various points as you listen to this record you can hear: the looped sound of a dot matrix printer as percussive texture; a delay-blasted guitar weaving in and out of arpeggiated synth bursts; a descending piano line that sounds like it’s haunting the corridors of a deserted school hall; a cluster of distorted loops building to a crescendo that wouldn’t sound out of place next to mid-period Autechre; the jacking drum machine intro to one track almost verging on acid house; the terms and conditions of a marketing offer repeated to the point of hypnotic trance. Despite any broad and subjective comparisons, this record is of course its own thing, an end result that is certainly more than the sum of its parts, the mood that is established unique to this band and these songs, the listener drawn inexorably into their world. Tracks rise and fall like the continuous destruction and reconstruction of the capital skyline, a mental map to locate the essence of London Clay.