Albums of the Year # 27 Vital Idles - Left Hand

From September:

From the first moments of listening to A Premise, the opening track of Glasgow Indie merchants Vital Idles June album Left Hand, I was thrilled. It's kitchen sink stuff and deeply familiar, certainly to anyone who ever listened to John Peel in the Eighties. That ragged, jagged but utterly determined momentum of so many angular Post and Post Punk groups of that decade.

Vital Idles keep heading doggedly forward while seemingly looking backwards for the course of Left Hand as you know very well that they will. It's the sound of sweaty grimy indie clubs in small towns and large cities the length and breadth of Britain going back almost forty years now with a band on a poorly lit stage with a dodgy sound system on a dreary drizzly winters evening. Doing it because it's the thing that they love and the sound that's best to articulate their ideas. My youth, long gone. Someone else's youth, right now.

This is a highly impressive reinvention, reminiscent of what Life Without Buildings, (also, probably non-coincidentally Glaswegians), did with their still remarkable debut Any Other City almost twenty years ago. Nothing on here is totally new. But it all seems fresh.

A couple of times the band raise the bar and allow the songs to stretch and meander beyond four minutes but for the most part they keep things short and sweet. There's actually an admirable discipline about doing this stuff as well as and as precisely as they do. If not, everyone would be doing it. But something as good as this in this medium is rare.

Spawned from Underground DIY Culture, the band clearly take what they do very seriously. Various members help run and work in publishers and art related shops and have served their apprenticeships in various local bands going back several years. But Left Hand, the band's debut album definitely seems like a point of arrival.

Everything is rigorous, minimalist and exact and grounded in a feel for these things strong enough to transport you to the feeling you had when you last spent time in a Rough Trade record shop, after stopping off at the local Oxfam's to get yourself a long coat to tide you through the coming months.

Vital Idles cross the 't''s and dot the 'i's, Highly likely to be my indie-retro album of the year, even pipping the marvellous Say Sue Me record. John.P, Raincoats, Au Pairs, Young Marble Giants, Delta 5, Girls At Their Best, Flying Nun and Pylon - your legacy is safe. Magnificent!