My Hood (3)

Only one review to complete our three part trip down memory avenue, but it's a long one, of two comps that came out on Misplaced Music. Indeed, a onetime member of Hood popped up on our messageboard at the time to describe the descriptions below as "worringly" in-depth, which was probably the right adverb. What it does do though, is set out my fairly undying affection for the band in minute detail, and make crystal how we'd obsessed over so many Adams Brothers incarnations over the years. It also returns to a theme we haven't given up on yet, my unrepentant fetishisation of both obscure 7"s and the thrill of the(ir) chase.

"hood "singles compiled" (misplaced music): hood "compilations 1995-2002" (misplaced music)

"sometimes your arms... are like a weight around my neck"

on one of the early hood releases that we plucked from a cobwebbed existence in a local indie store's 7" rack a half-decade ago, a good old-fashioned paper insert noted wryly, "there's plenty more where this came from". as we well know now, that wasn't the half of it. but then again, wetherby's most adaptable combo have fashioned a career (of sorts) from understatement in all its forms. while we lament once more the lack of pylons on the sleeves of these timely reissues (the band choosing to spurn the traditional telegraph poles and wire stacks, leaving these two rekkids bedecked only in images of northern fields blinking in early-day sunlight) everything else about "singles compiled" and "compilations", from the unassuming typewriter track list to the comforting chunky band logo, is 100% authentik h-o-o-d: the real thing, the hood that this website remains obsessed with. what more could a boy or a girl need than two new compilations showcasing three more glorious hours of hood's sonic fumblings over 79 (listen to 'em) trax ? don't answer - it's a rhetorical question.

so let's tuck in to the banquet properly, picking from the feast of thought-fragments that constitute blissful mid-period hood, "singles compiled" first. the chinstroking arrivistes who have only just latched onto west yorkshire's finest rustic-altpop quartet (on the merely trifling grounds that "cold house" happens to be potentially a landmark english "rock" album) will be maxi-flummoxed. cd1 especially will send these fairweathers scurrying back to their post-rock primers - it is rough and tumble not very-fi of some class as a host of demos and 4-track segments collide drunkenly, reversing into each other constantly like the time we went down the fair at la condamine and blew 200F on an insane number of jetons for the dodgems. if you're not going to like this album you will know within seconds of the opening "a harbour of thoughts" as a no-fi hidden vocal cowers behind an epileptic strum but pours out as much tangible human emotion as one should ever need. in and around the scuffed, self-conscious half-songs there are still a few palpable steps forward towards the modern all-conquering, genre-straddling hood - the title track of the 555 ep "(the) weight" nicely hid a charming pop song inamongst a stop-start, glitch-influenced arrhythm, and its companion piece "impossible calm" suggests in its fifty-odd seconds the electronic direction that the band would move to in places on future albums.

"i swear i'll finish the bottle / i'll stumble outside..."

tasty morsels like "biochemistry revision can wait", "forehead" and "dismissed army brought us knives" between them sum up every teenage feeling we ever had: and the first "accessible" a-side ("i've forgotten how to live", which got compared to the wedding present by the papers of the day) is included too, together with its preview in rougher form on the "lee faust's million piece orchestra" ep (oh, if only reissues could translate the joy of buying a record whose sleeve was a scrap of photocopied paper pritt-sticked on to a brown paper bag). meanwhile, pristine tunes like "clues to our past and future existence" profit from an outing on digital simply because their pressing plant-challenging use of quiet / loud dynamics asked an awful lot of the 7" format [having said that, this cd has been mastered from vinyl, so perhaps the problem was really our pre-jurassic hardware]. then there's "the year of occasional lull", a whispered near-instrumental single that shepherded them yet more forcefully into the promised land of indie-dub, like "(the) weight" revisited in mellower climes - and do you remember the single "filmed initiative", every copy of which came with its own photograph, still so fresh from prontaprint that you could still smudge it with your icky fingers ? well it's here in full effect too. (it is probably redundant to point out that our copy has a photograph of the sun breaking over a few telegraph poles...)

"singles compiled" also documents how in longer, spaced-out songs like "as evening changed the day" (the b side and alter-ego of "filmed initiative", later remixed for a 555 compilation) hood laid down, as we may have mentioned before, a prototype for much of what came later, including the songs that made up the spine of "cold house". on "i know what to squander" we also hear an early use of the single-note violin sound that crops up on their later albums. and this double-cd set is finished off with no less than 15 unreleaseds (yaay!), many of which are as good as their back catalogue: take "innocence of brittle days" whose focus is "to rid myself of the city" (reprising the "oh how the city gets me down" sentiment of "70s manual worker") or the halkyn-like fragility of "leaves across the road". and in all of these songs there is also a real mindset that only exceptionally is there any need to go too far above the one-minute mark: so even though on their two lower-fi albums "cabled linear traction" and "silent 88" there were plenty of strong 3 or 4 minute indie guitar tunes ("british radars", "the field is cut") inamidst the short songs, here we are very much in the realm of minimalism. witness "crow blown west" (almost a single, repeated thought, "i don't know why i bother with you") à la "silent 88"'s "i hate you now". it seems very adolescent but for that, all the more affecting.

inevitably and despite all the joys packed in, things are still frustratingly incomplete - we accept that the canadian label happy-go-lucky's "structured disasters" cd homed in on the "sirens" and "opening into enclosure: a disused post-mill" eps and some choice out-takes, so those omissions are justifiable (even though, by the same token, a clutch of those tracks reappear here). but then the definitive version of "silo crash" (from the "harbour of thoughts" ep) is missing, while "i've forgotten how to live"'s dramatic flipside "dimensions t.b.a." is wrongly reduced, apparently at the band's insistence rather than just for time purposes: in its full form, it was a wonderful song, 3/4 of which was down to the magical, haphazard, intro that starts with random single notes and works up imperfectly but imperiously to emotional implosion - the edit here gives us the implosion but excises the intro, and thus sacrifices so much of the power of the song. it's perhaps also a shame, although we're confident it will be addressed at some future date, that their debut 7" for domino recordings, "useless" isn't exhumed, as it was a top shambler, perhaps this time vaguely justifying wedding present comparisons with warm-guitar sincerity, and far removed from the ambient patterns of album "rustic houses, forlorn valleys" that soon followed it and emphasised their versatility.

and then there's "compilations (1995-2002)". this has a little bit more variation overall - it's a free-range curate's egg in which, par exemple, "sound the cliché klaxons" is simply a beautiful should-have-been single despite its jokey title, "i have it in my heart to jump into the ocean" is one of those many sublime variations on "as evening changed the day", "a shot across the bow" with its church organ and dub echo is a sinking companion for squarepusher's "our underwater torch", and "cross the land" is just one of those brilliant tracks that starts as a moving, heartbreaking soliloquoy but eventually transmutes into the sound of a grand piano being pushed down the stairs while meat whiplash tune up on the adjacent balcony.

all those good old recurring hood lyrical themes are here - memories of childhood, deep insecurity, the passing of time (or as they would later have it, "the cycle of days and seasons") - and they were never without some self-mocking humour, either - a.c. would be proud of titles like "we'll never live up to the first l.p." (a tongue-in-cheek j&mc tribute ? the backing is "just like honey" and there's a hell of a lot of feedback, man), "rocck ? i can't even spell the word" (a slurred rehash of "disappointed" from the "harbour of thoughts" ep) or "killing the band" (knee deep in the realm of ambienteca, but a reference to prolapse, presumably, unless we are rather overestimating prolapse's importance in the scheme of things).

these records sum up the appeal to many of us of "indie" music and what it really is. there's not a song here that isn't warm, honest and refreshing and the fact that many of the earlier songs could have been recorded by any bright, earnest teenagers on to a 2-track is neither here nor there. yeah, the tunesmiths will listen to the frailer stuff and say "oh, anyone could do that" (as if that was actually a reason for not liking something, and the thought hadn't occurred to them that if they were that bothered they could ac.tually have located the courage of their convictions and gone out and done it themselves), but the reality is that most labels that hood recorded for (and there are approx 6000) will never have released anything better."