Again, Coombes, Wood and Smith play musical statues. It takes them a little while to make the decision but when they clam up, they do so as one, momentarily abandoning Stevens, the implausible Tibetan monk, to a harsh spotlight of their spontaneous construction. Lasting for only a few years before Wood disappeared to India, this was a group that relished such glorious incidents of embarrassment and hiatus. The mutual incomprehension tended to be address with a hurricane of hilarity and beer in the pub afterwards. Listening to the quartet I hear a music of implication.
Individual events are too fleeting, to fugitive to be fully absorbed.
This was music that refused to hang about or to make the obvious moves, a febrile cluster of flurries, stop motion rhythms, blunted and truncated snaps, drones that lost the will to drone, pitches too brittle or transient to accommodate melody, larks that promised ascent then dropped dead out of the sky. Kitless with Elbow highlights the difference between the three players. Playing mini-trumpet, Stevens brings some of his love for free jazz into a group that was essentially chamber. This was reckless music that somehow expressed sensitivity through insensitivity and if Stevens wanted to blast it, then the others weren't about to damp his ardour. They should have been filmed.