Next Wave #649 – Kagoule

Prodigal post-punks with a noise streak...

“Go and get fucking Kim Deal if you want her, dickwads.”

Lucy, bassist in Nottingham’s teen grungers, Kagoule, is clearly already tired of lazy ‘women in rock’ comparisons. She may still be in bright pink train-tracks, but this is a woman who knows her own mind.

The band’s debut LP, Urth, is out later this month, and even though the three piece are all just 19, it has been a long time coming; ever since Lucy, Cai and Lawrence formed a band in the heady days of Year Nine.

“We mutually disliked a lot of stuff,” says drummer Lawrence (surely the basis of most good friendships), who approached Lucy when he overheard her complaining about Iron Maiden in music class. “They were trying to teach me ‘Run To The Hills’ on keyboard,” she remembers, “And I really didn’t want to learn it. It was a big brawl, but it turned into a band.”

What resulted from this meeting of young minds was something impressively complex, full of fuzz and dirge one second, ethereal and swooping the next. Kagoule have been compared to Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins, Mudhoney et al but their music is more than just a reworking; in fact, they’d never heard of half those bands when they started.

“I never really listened to music from the past,” says Cai, guitarist and lead vocalist. “We only found out about a lot of those bands through being compared to them, from reading our own reviews – that opened up a whole massive world, it’s when I started listening to older music.”

The band in fact draws on a deep well of influence, rather than the grunge that their music calls to mind: Lucy, a trained singer, grew up surrounded by Beatles records, “They made me see how you could be more than just average. I was listening to a lot of average indie, and then I went back to them and was like, ‘Woah man, there’s more to music than this,” she remembers.

Lawrence, with enviably cool parents, recalls driving around in the back of their car as a kid, with Grandaddy and The Strokes on the stereo – bands he’s now gone back to. Cai’s ambiguous, symbolic lyrics are heavily influenced by 80s sci-fi fantasy author, Gene Wolfe – in fact the LP’s title is taken from one of his books, The Urth of the New Sun.

They talk ardently about song structure, playing with accepted musical norms, and you can hear this in the variety of their output: ‘Glue’, with its urgent, pulsing, pushing drums; the wistful ‘Made of Concrete’, led by Lucy’s shimmering, Cocteau Twins-ish vocal; the uncannily Smashing Pumpkins (circa Siamese Dream) guitar of ‘It Knows It’; and ‘Gush’ with its sombre, drifting verse erupting into an angular, noise fuzz of a chorus.

And then they’re onto dreams – Cai had his first murder dream last night, “It was was outside Lawrence’s house, and a guy in a black top with slicked back hair saw me do it…then we drove away in our mini bus.” – and Nottingham’s thriving underground DIY scene, with infamous warehouse venue, JT Soar. These prodigal post-punks are impossible to pin down: that’s what makes this new record so exciting.

WHAT: Fuzzy noise rock, gilded with delicate vocals and symbolism
WHERE: Nottingham

GET 3 SONGS: ‘Glue’, ‘Made of Concrete’, ‘Gush’

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Words: Emma Finamore

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