This week’s NME rock heroes are the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, last week it was Arctic Monkey, while Coldplay’s last album was described widely as a ‘masterpiece.’ Why do I mention this? Is it because such media hype has gone over-the-top mainstream, and in the process made heroes out of villains? Or is it because so much great talent gets overlooked in the stampede for column inches or TV/radio minutes? Well, it’s a bit of both really, but perhaps can explain why a band like Mohair, with four years touring under its belt, is under-hyped here in the UK…

A few weeks ago I received an album sampler from this band and was reminded a little later by the band’s PR agent, in addition to receiving a polite and rather nice letter from the band. Each band member signed the letter with the rather prophetic closing words, ‘All the best’ because folks that is precisely what I got when I played the promo copies. Everything I Want opens the album on an explosive rock note. The bass guitar, drums and harmonies are something else and remind me of the sort of plain and simple hard rock that seems so hard to find right now. Classic guitar riffs, a rampant vocal, killer rhythm and melody make this a get-up-and-go song that should be a hoot in alternative dance clubs. A great start then. Disarray is a lazy-paced rock ditty where the vocal comes into its own, with a few rebel yells adding spice in the choruses. Then there’s the classic, soaring and diving guitar riffs that complete a stonking rock package. And by now I’m thinking, ‘what a great fucking band!’ But there’s more… The next track is End Of The Line which mightily impresses with its highly original sound heavily laced with Tex-Mex flavouring. The vocal alone makes me want to go see this band perform live, and very soon. Superb! Little Voices takes another a sharp right turn with an epic pop/rock song that could so easily make a large dent in the single chart. It’s bouncing, it’s catchy, it’s fuckin’ great! The final track on this album sampler is Keep It Together. Its opening Queen style guitar riffs, epic vibe, devastating multi-layered vocals and strong melody do it for me, big time…

Then I played the single called Life with it clever changes of pace, and superb instrumental arrangement that includes a subtly placed piano, and a conclusion that has to be heard to be believed. Then comes a very beautiful acoustic song called Broken Pieces with its lovely lyrics, and compelling Strawberry Fields Forever ambience. So there you have it, a band who has served a hard and probably turbulent apprenticeship, producing music that you simply have to listen to, and that knocks the over-hyped shit for six. The big surprise for me here is the extraordinarily good production quality that manages to bring instruments and vocals into sharp focus. Tom, Pete, Alex and Tim may still have a recognition mountain to climb, but I can’t think of a better start to the campaign. All The Best….

4.5/5

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SMALL TALK – TRACK-BY-TRACK

Talk of the Town

This song was written at our homebuilt studio in Bushey (nr. Watford) this song, I guess, is about being big fish in a very small pond. It’s where the title ‘SMALL TALK‘ came from for the album. I guess we’re all sick of small talk… we make it with people we like, people we don’t like and people who we don’t see enough to get to that stage in the conversation where we can make ‘big talk’. Being away a lot drives a wedge between you and the place that you come from; perhaps you start seeing it for what it is instead of being submersed in the everydayness of it all. It’s kinda weird when you come home and not a thing has changed but yourself.

Life

Also written in Bushey. The original line was “you got liar written all over your face” but Pete misheard me and thought it was ‘Life‘ which was actually a lot more meaningful. The verses are from a tune that Tim wrote last year that was never properly looked at…. they just seemed to fall out of the sky and onto the chords that we were playing around with at the time.

End of the Line

A track that’s been through the mill with us. This is the only song I think we’ve ever written that we’ve played at every gig since the day we wrote it. We were poised and ready to release the old version of this song a year ago before the walls of our situation with our old label started to fall. Although we got the rights to the song back a year after the split we couldn’t use the recording or the video as they were owned by the label… so we just re-recorded it! It’s mad trying to redo something that already has vibe and a certain quality of its own because you’ll never recapture it perfectly, no matter how you try so we had to come at it from a completely different angle. We had made a video that we all loved that we weren’t being permitted to use so we re-shot that as well… again, the same but different.

Disarray

This has always been a live favourite but previous recordings have failed to do it justice I think. We wanted to get a preacher/congregation feel to the choruses so we did the backing vocals as lots of different characters… the bored housewife, the jealous husband, his crazy brother, the howlin’ baby etc. Written, you could say, at a low. The song is about not forcing something if it doesn’t want to be forced… you’ll only break it and then it’s no use to anyone.

Stranded (in the middle of nowhere)

Originally called ‘Middle of Nowhere’. We also went through the mill with this one. We wrote and recorded it in our studio as a demo, and before we’d even played it live we were recording it for a single down in Newquay with Paul Reeve. We sat on the recording for a while, went on another big tour around the UK and proceeded to make the video (on an old Routemaster bus around London). By then the recording was being questioned. We had been playing it live, bedding in the song and the performance on record wasn’t really living up to what we were expecting of ourselves… so we went in to record it again on a day off in the middle of the tour. We were in Scotland trying to approve mixes over the phone and it all got a bit much… in the end the second recording ended up no better than the first. This is when we realised we had to work with Mark Wallis. The only bloke to ever get the magnitude of our sound onto record before then. We recorded the final version (having also done another demo of our own… totalling 5 versions in all!) as the first track of the album session with Mark and David Ruffy in June 2005. Then Hot Hot Heat announced the release of their single ‘Middle of Nowhere’ the week before ours… what are the chances!! So we had to recall the 1000 or so copies that had been printed and change the title to ‘Stranded (in the middle of nowhere)’…

Little Voice

It was written as part of a batch of songs at Barachan home Farm in Scotland where we retreated to restock the repertoire (after we got out of our deal) in the late summer of 2004. It’s full of dilemmas and mischief!

Everything I Want

This was our chance to rock out on the album. We’ve been playing songs of this nature since we started… the slightly more song-y, off the wall stuff bled its way through over the years but we are a loud rock ‘n’ roll band at heart. I like the fact that there are two people in the verse (’she’ and ‘you’) and it’s about that stage where you’re weighing up the pros and cons of a win-win situation that comes at a price… again full of dilemma. There is a more bluesy-psychedelic ‘live’ version of this on the B-side to Stranded.

Thin Air

This is the first song that we wrote completely together… sitting around having equal input into the melting pot on the coffee table. We had just made the decision that we were gonna be splitting everything 4 ways from that moment on. All for one, one for all kinda thing. That’s a really hard thing for a band to do, but for me its essential. You are a band, a gang, a troop, a unit… The reason you write the way you do in the first place is because of the band around you. Without them the songs would sound totally different and that to me is as much a part of the creation as anything. We knew what we were about to go through and we knew we’d be doing it together. No one person should end up with more money than the next should if it all take off. Also as soon as you make a decision like that you find things coming out of people on a creative level that you wouldn’t normally expect.

Keep It Together

This is another Barachan song. This is the second version of this song. We released the first one as a single in May 2005. I guess you could say its our two fingers up to those who had said that without the deal we were ‘through’… a few million Bosnians can’t be wrong, eh?.

L.A Song

The bones of this were written on our return from Los Angeles a few years ago. We’d gone out there with our old company to play to ‘the industry’ at a showcase at The Roxy Theatre on Sunset Strip. We were without a single, without an album, without even a half decent demo at that point. We hadn’t even really done much touring but there we were, in Hollywood having the time of our lives. It was 10 days of utter carnage (with the odd gig thrown in for good measure) but overall just an excuse for our record company to show off their feathers. We came back expecting the world to have changed but in truth we were nowhere near ready for it even if it had!

Ok… so that’s the album…. here’s something of the beginnings…

We were all in bands, together and separately, from the age of about 12. Pete and I went to the same primary school and he met Tim at ‘big’ school when they started their first blues band. I had a band with my brother and sister playing covers stuff while Alex was lurking away the other side of the county playing classical concerts and in the church choir! Tim joined my band when we were about 15 then Pete came in on trumpet when I met Alex at a show we were both involved in a year or so later. This evolved into a 10 piece soul band doing weddings and the like until I left school and went travelling in India for a year where I started to write songs. When I got back it was just the 4 of us left. Everyone else had gone to university or got jobs… and that was it really… it all started from there, and that’s when we knew there was no other way for us to live.

Tom B