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It's been going on ten years since Craig Tattersall and Andrew Johnson left
Hood - of which they were founding members - and continuing comparisons are
as inevitable as they are obvious. Metaphorically unhooded for a while as
The Famous Boyfriend, they followed a similar trajectory as the universal
flirtations with the rapidly evolving Powerbook/Cubase/Protools environment
swept across the ‘nineties music landscape like a mighty wind of change.
The very name they chose for themselves seemed an ironic reflection of a kind
of self-effacing shoe-shufflingness – I’m with them (well, used
to be). And they, too, had their awkward Autechre-meets-The-Field-Mice period.
It was equally inevitable, after such a separation, that the earlier attempts
at establishing their own voice should involve a bit of stumbling and getting
lost.
But all that came to an end with a name-change and a one-off association with
the mighty Mogwai. Their collaboration on a couple of tracks on the enormously
influential 2001 album Rock Action showed that The Remote Viewer was
finally emerging as an evolved entity in its own right. Check out Drum
Machine, a 4.8Mb download of a vinyl-only-released outtake from Rock
Action on the Mogwai website
for a revelatory insight into that period of evolution in progress (and a
24 carat treat into the bargain). Subsequent work has demonstrated unequivocally
that whereas The Remote Viewer is of the family Hood (still quite recognisably
- and proudly so, I’d have thought) it now sits on a different branch
entirely, singing quite different tunes, though no less mellifluously.
A steady one album a year (± 1) since the 1999 début (whose
title – Quiet is the New Loud – set out both the stall and
the tone for everything that has followed) brings us to this, their third
full-length on the City Centre Offices label. As 2004’s You’re
Going to Love Our Defeatist Attitude seemed simply a natural continuation
of what was begun in 2002’s Here I Go Again On My Own, so Let
your Heart Draw A Line seems simply a continuation of Defeatist.
It’s as if they’d discovered a seam somewhere out there in the darkest
backend of Manchester that they’re just in process of steadily and quietly
mining, unconcerned with silly concerns about deadlines or pleasing the fickle
masses or (God forbid!) sales – plenty enough Mancy major stool-pigeons
doing that – and, employing the eminently sensible principle that if
it ain’t broke why fix it, they seem set on continuing to tease out these
little annual gems until, at some point, there’ll be a critical accumulation
that will coalesce into a mighty opus revealing, retrospectively, the hidden
secrets of the universe and the true masonic purposes of the New Musical Express.
Meanwhile, Let Your Heart Draw A Line evokes those moments of wistful
regret when the pain of the last lost love is beginning to fade and to be
replaced by a craving for jaffa cakes. Whispery vocals and somnambulist instrumental
meditations resonate with the inspired, listless harmonics of the weary insomniac.
Nothing here above 5dBA, or the sound-level of a duvet-muffled sob.
Three of the album’s outstanding vocal tracks are sung as well as written
by long-term collaborator Nicola Hodgkinson of Empress (whose skills Hood
also continue to employ on a regular basis): Sometimes You Can’t Decide
emerges almost by accident out of the back of a haunting little melody that
sounds as though it’s been lifted from a Japanese ice-cream truck; Take
Your Lights With You is a sweet two-minute two-liner sung against a Jackson
Pollock wall of random buzzes and scratches with only a single keyboard line
for company; and I’m Sad Feeling is a simple song, simply and
beautifully sung, rendered achingly resonant by the inclusion of a repeated
chime that might have dripped off the Boards of Canada palette but feels absolutely
right here.
There’s a beguiling effortlessness about The Remote Viewer’s work
that might easily be mistaken for torpor. It’s certainly monotonous,
in the strictest literal sense, and it would be nice to be able to point to
at least one standout track that left you breathless, but woven into this
seemingly relaxed and relatively featureless texture is an artful thread of
almost throwaway brilliance: repeated listening continually discovers ear-cocking
surprises that, I swear, just weren’t there the last time. Musician as
magician. And, like all the best showmen, they leave you hanging on a final
track – How Did You Both Look Me In The Eye? – that stops
just at the point when you’re leaning forward to grasp the moment of
final revelation. It’s almost as bad as getting the VCR timer wrong and
losing the last five minutes of an episode of Alias - another of those lifting-off-the-stylus
moments that’s characterized the long pauses between each of The Remote
Viewer’s last three albums. Music as soap. So roll credits, and ff another
year or so to that uniquely wonderful sound of the needle biting the groove
in the vinyl again. Metaphorically, of course.
April 2005
