Features

A unique 365˚angle

The Sunday Experience – A unique 365˚angle!

reverse family

Might take a bit of explaining this next one. Started off with a curiously intriguing exchange of emails with the Reverse Family, seems these dudes are shortly, well next week to be a bit more precise, about to embark on a seriously ambitious release schedule, in fact I’ll tell you what, best if I let Andy himself take up the baton and explain in person ….

‘ …. this set of releases starts on October 2nd and sees me (Reverse Family) putting out a 7-track ep every Monday for a year. 52 eps in all – 365 songs (one ep will have 8 tracks so it all adds up and that’s it. It will be available through our perfect pop co-op label and all of the Usual digital places. There will also be a monthly sampler on nub records (a bite size ‘best of’) to people afford a purchase. I intend to do a physical release at some point but it will be expensive so need to get interest in it first, this will include diary entries for the year too!’

.. indeed, at that point, I too had to re-read just to make sure my eyes weren’t playing up. I’m thinking like you probably, that this either the mindset of someone bitten by the creative bug or taken a knock to the head which once the bruising has relented, will no doubt wonder what the hell he’s let himself in for. Anyway, during the course of those email exchanges, we were suddenly asked, what’s your favourite number, us being awkward plumbed for four – 6, 11, 23 and 29 in case you ask. Okay then, the response came, I’ll burn those tracks to a CD and get it off to you post haste. Days later a CD arrives, handwritten note an all, with not three but ten tracks peeled from the Reverse Family sonic draw pot. In a former life, with the Scratch, we’d always suspected that Andy had wiled away the days fully versed in the ways of the Buzzcocks and Magazine (in fact that same dayglo dalliance is still ever present, not least on the sharply acute power pop burn of the effervescently teased bubble grooved ‘was I a good man?’). Seems similar tropes come to play here, albeit suspiciously subtled by the impish appearance of Syd Barrett to the prickly palette, as curiously evidenced on the loosely dippy ‘we got it – supreme positivity’ here as though channelled through the viewfinder of Adam Ant c. ‘dirks wears white sox’ .  As said 10 tracks, a sampler therein plucked from a choice peppering taken from the first handful of planned EP’s. Very much reminiscent of AB Leonard’s mammoth ‘Octopus’ schedule from a few years ago and similarly toned. ‘no reason to run’ opens the proceedings, a track whose snakish garage haloed soft psych tilt is bleached with a distant nod to a certain Mr Hitchcock c. Soft Boys’ ‘underwater moonlight’ and something that finds itself somewhat contrasted by the drift like mellowing kaleidoscopia that peels from the deceptively warmly smoking ‘summer thunder’ which by these ears certainly has something of an Elephant 6 crookedness about its wares. Talking of kookiness or was it crookedness, simple kid is instantly called to mind with the arrival of the playfully minimalist ‘filth and lame’ while elsewhere there’s the insular dark heart ‘7pm’ which you feel, adored with weeping string arrangements might shine it with a Rialto like mastery, that’s not to say this doesn’t sting as it stands, cowered as it is by a heart heavy introspection. Superbly threaded with prowling pulsars, there’s a seductive wiring chic flavouring ‘sunshade city’ that had us of a mind to go rooting out our prized Wolfmen stash while the darkly weaving shadow torn cabaret that is ‘the bigger picture’, in truth the best thing here, slowly picks away at the scabs ushering in a chokingly edgy psychosis which had we not known better, might have hazarded a guess had fallen from the flip side of an early Bauhaus b-side. Glam draped reverbs drip from the ghostly Bolan-esque ‘the test’ while grooving amid the psychotropic purr of ‘the sun’s rays are like birthdays’ are spectral echoes of a youthful Psychic TV. So in answer to our opening question, obviously the creative bug option is afoot here, here’s to the next 355 tracks. www.reversefamily.co.uk