Luke Abbot meets Spiritualized meets Vangelis meets, er, Art Garfunkel
Transept are from Norwich. Better journalists than I would tell you more perhaps, but one listen to this, their second long player, and you won’t need to know anything beyond what your ears are screaming at you. Norfolk, clearly, ain’t a bad place to be, as AC/DC once almost said.
‘Happysburgh’ (a decent joke for the East Anglians in the house) is a terrifying, repetitive, 15-minute harmonium-like swirl and ‘Sea Sentinel’ sounds like Spiritualized forced through a metal sieve with a silver spoon. ‘Let’s Go’ comes over all Flaming Lips sleepwalking, while the fantastically titled ‘Supermoon Party Bucket’ is longwave Vangelis lovely. Which leaves the thrilling deep throb of ‘Muscle Beach’, with its relentlessly swelling Teutonic two-step, to sweep up.
The whole lot is a little bit wobbly, delightfully so, and it’s clearly the richer for being mixed by production big tomato Luke Abbott and mastered in Berlin by mastering, er, master Rashad Becker. But it’s ‘Bright Eyes’, which the band helpfully describe as ‘laptop chamber orchestra’ in style, that slays. What? That bunny song? Yup. That bunny song. The genius of a minimally squiffy, yet almost entirely faithful version of the Art Garfunkel weepy cannot be understated.
It seems that Transept also do a full-length live soundtrack manipulation of ‘Watership Down’, the very idea of which makes my head hurt. If it’s as good as this tempting sonic outing suggests, that sounds like a proper night out, doesn’t it?
