By Ranjit Dighe
Full disclosure: Birmingham Electric is my friend Andy’s band and we’ve been friends for fifty years, so objectivity may be hard to come by. There’s a pleasant familiarity about their sound, including their new album, Terra Incognita, that’s as personal as it is musical.
For example, a song like “The Signal” deftly evokes hooky synth bands from the ‘80s like New Order and Tears for Fears that we enjoyed together. Andy’s fine singing voice has a timbre much like his speaking voice. You don’t have to be a longtime friend of his to love this song, but it probably helps.
The song “Hydrogen,” on the other hand, sounds like nothing I’ve heard from him before. It’s a beautiful pastiche of an old-timey newsreel voice talking about hydrogen ions taking flight, a drum machine track, some lovely and languid trumpet, and finally a drop-dead gorgeous, ethereal soprano. It’s one of those endlessly hummable vocals like the female harmony on “Eyes without a Face” (speaking of ‘80s music).
The guest vocalist is Siobhan de Mare. I hadn’t heard of her before, but she was in a band with Cocteau Twins founder Robin Guthrie. Which is fitting, because her singing has that hypnotic quality of Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser. I didn’t really notice her words at first, but they mention defying gravity (and depravity — nice rhyme) and taking flight. Like a …hydrogen ion. Ingenious, though I was too wrapped up in the music to notice how it all fit together until about my tenth listen. “Trip hop” might be a fitting description, if I knew that genre well enough. What I do know is that I’ll be keeping this song in heavy rotation for a long time.
^^^
Ranjit Dighe lives in upstate New York. He does economic history research on topics including beer, alcohol prohibition and immigration. He is the editor-annotator of The Historian’s Wizard of Oz and The Historian’s Huck Finn. His greatest passion is music, including the Oswego House Concerts he hosts with his wife.