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Steeple Remove: Position Normal
Yes, yes, I know. This album came out at the end of 2015. I’m at least 6 months late. ‘Never knowingly on the pop pulse’ isn’t the motto of this website for no good reason. But come on, have a look at my Google Drive – see that folder there? That’s got some reviews of albums that have come out recently that I’ll be posting soon. Really.
Oi! What are you doing? Don’t look at that other folder! Stop it! Give me the mouse back! Forget you ever saw what you just saw. Please.
Ahem…anyway we’re here to talk about French band Steeple Remove’s first album for 6 years, Position Normal, and not what’s lying about in my cloud storage. I don’t know much about the city of Rouen, other than it featured in the game Call of Duty 3. Thankfully Steeple Remove don’t seem to take their influence from that, so there’s no songs about annoying teenagers continually headshotting you and then pretending to teabag your prone body.
Or are there…?
No. There are not. (I don’t think so anyway).
What is does have are songs which successfully meld synth-led motorik and post-punk influences. Other blogs may have honed in on Bauhaus or a trippier Echo and the Bunnymen sounds coming through, but – in a move which is sure to see me fired from the Both Bars On team – I think Position Normal has more than a little something of Simple Mind’s classic 1980 album Empires & Dance about it.
Opener Mirrors is all sharp edged guitar, atmospheric synths and haunting vocal, plus what sounds like a screaming ghost around the halfway mark. (Wooooooh! That’s the sound of a ghost. In French). It gets both effects and more musically heavy for the last couple of minutes before segueing very nicely into the urgent synth and bass repetitiveness of Silver Banana. Plus it has lyrics we can all relate to: “A silver banana in my hand / It’s good enough for you it’s good enough for me”.
We’ve all had that kind of weekend.
My favourite songs are always ones that feature a prominent, driving bass line and Steeple Remove do not disappoint in that regard – see Imaginary Girl, Sunshine, Calling Up and album highlight Activation, which ushers you in with an arpeggiated 8-bit pulse and gives you a one word sing-along chorus to boot.
Throw in a great Psychic TV cover (Unclean) and the eerie Western (as in Cowboy film) sounding Invisible Lights and you’ve got a cracking album that may not be the most original thing you’ve heard, but is certainly an enjoyable and rewarding long player.
Home Run finishes things off in a rousing manner; an optimistic sounding instrumental motorik and synth journey for the most part until it’s allowed to gently dissolve about four minutes through before reprising the main theme in bare-bones fashion.
Get it now from Bandcamp or your local reputable purveyor of recorded sound.
PS We’ve reviewed Steeple Remove before – you can have a look here. And then have a look here.
petecollins
Steeple Remove: Electric Suite
Some bands generate a sound and style, discover it’s a winning formula and stick with it, avoiding deviation like the plague. Others generate a shite formula and stick with it, helpfully allowing most of the populace to avoid them like diseased rats. Steeple Remove, it seems, have gone for variation in style as a winning formula, avoiding sameness like contaminated rodents. Question is, does this formula win? Well, yes. Mostly.
Second full album, Electric Suite, might not have had the sheer impact that Radio Silence did on my listening habits, but there is much here to admire mainly because Steeple Remove seem to be very adept at achieving across a variety of genres.
The Blade Runner urban imagery that so dominated Radio Silence is here again, but rather than sounding genuinely futuristic, this time the cityscapes are more akin to when Ridley Scott’s masterpiece was released – i.e. 1982. Sirens blaze, traffic swoops and Casio keyboards sizzle on opener ‘Radio Kill Surfers’, conjuring images of Miami rather than Rouen (SR’s home town). More 80s images are invoked on ‘Magnetosphere’ which sounds all Jarvis in clinging corduroy on a glitter balled dance floor. Indeed, ‘Off the Air’ could easily be an extra track on His ‘n’ Hers.
But just as you think you’ve located Steeple Remove, both spatially and temporally, they go and hit you with ‘Somerset Lights’ or ‘Flash Resonance’ – two wonderful slabs of ambient drone. Stand-out track, however, has to be ‘Yellow Loop’ which sounds like The Earlies meets Neu! – top stuff.
So whereas they might have turned down the guitars a bit (although last track ‘Still Life’ has got the feedback) and gone a bit poppier, Steeple Remove are very much worth pursuing (though probably in a speedboat rather than a spinner this time).
Vive la difference and all that.
Go sockless and stroll down here to buy it.
angrybonbon
p.s. cheers dintcheff!
Wake up…time to drone
References to Blade Runner always pique my interest. Although, when I read the slogan ‘If you ever wished that Blade Runner was a perfect pop song, then this for you’ I tend to imagine bad and apparently ‘haunting’ (read ‘there’s some reverb on it’) saxophone. Thankfully, French five piece Steeple Remove avoid using sax on Radio Silence and plump instead for fuzzed up guitars, old synths and droning wonderfulness.
Yes, this is very good. One could easily and lazily reference MBV, Stooges, Krautrock, Telescopes (even) and moments of intense footwear gazing, but there’s much more going on here: full opener Gonzo Gazing drifts and swirls adorably, instrumental Free Open Tune is precisely that in a space-rocked-up manner, Indoor Reptile has got that sleazy Jarvis/Pulp-esque claustrophobia to it and Hyperprism is Loop-meets-Suicide (although this is let down by sex-noises which I, for some reason, always hate in any song). And throughout there’s moments when I wish the next and crushingly inevitable cut of Blade Runner (c’mon there’s got be more – a ‘cubist’ cut, an ‘adult interest’ cut) is OST’d by this lot, rather than Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou and his dodgy sax.
So whilst you can play spot the influence here without too much difficulty the resulting product is really rather ace. What’s more there’s a comforting variety to the tunes here that seems to be sadly lacking in the indie (broadly taken) world at the moment. Although it could be I’m just not listening to the right stuff.
Oh and I’ve got a question for any blogger (music or otherwise) who happens across us: how on earth do you find time to keep you site updated? When do you do it? I (and I imagine my co-conspirator) needs some tips, natch?
Anyway, get your head round these beauties. Can’t wait to see them live.
Buy Radio Silence here.
angrybonbon
Both Bars On 