Ulrika Spacek are an Alternative English rock band that have been operating under the radar for a number of years. If you want to label them, and labelling and comparisons are generally necessary with music, you might describe what they do as art with discordant guitars. Sonic Youth, Deerhunter, My Bloody Valentine. That kind of thing.
New album Compact Trauma, (surprisingly only their third in all since debuting in 2016), will immediately appeal to anyone remotely prone to this stuff. It starts off as it means to go on with atonal, oddly tuned guitars and abstracted vocals and continues from there in a similar vein. You might find yourself drifting into a trance at some points. I did on first listen but found that I liked the sensation.
They hail from Reading, Berkshire. The jury is out on Reading. Let's face it, the jury is always out on all of us, forever. But Reading more than most places or people that I can think of. Whenever I've been in Reading it's felt most of all like an expression of inexpressible dullness. Sorry Reading residents and fans but it has.
Now I've lost my chance forever of being granted the keys to Reading I must say it has at least given us Ulrika Spacek They are not dull and I can't think of another band operating in the UK currently that do quite what they do. They offer a hint of the strange. The kind of thing that Bowie offered in the early Seventies and Wire did again at the end of that decade. Then Pavement and Radiohead throughout the Nineties.
Most of all this record reminds me of Radiohead. Both bands hail from a similar part of the world and they share a certain ennui. Compact Trauma reminds me how extraordinary The Bends sounded when you first heard it. So alienated and out of time. Waiting for time to catch up with it.
I can offer no higher compliments. Compact Trauma is another quite excellent record on Ulrika Spacek's own personal conveyor belt of gifts to the universe. Feel free to lift it off the belt and sample it for yourselves.
Yes, a welcome return! I thought they might have packed up, particularly after the Astrel K album last year... Have you heard the Index for Working Musik album? Randomly came across it a few weeks ago via Spotify, but rather like it. Another interesting British band!
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