“You won’t like them,” I was warned. Not sure who by, might even have been one of the band. Nothing more certain to make me love them, of course.
Back then, Earwig were a five piece, soon to be three, playing unmistakeable indie pop with a drum machine underneath. They were not yet jaw-dropping, but there was already something special: in the melodies let loose by Julian Tardo and Dimitri Voulis’ guitars, in the way that Kirsty Yates’ vocals seemed to peer through the window at the clamour and turn away. They were a little distant, a little aloof, and I’ve always fallen hard for that.
Even so, there were few signs of what was to follow, as the guitars gradually fell away and left something completely distinctive. 1992’s Under My Skin I Am Laughing was an album of skittering loops, shadows threatening silence, complicated minimalism, occasional climaxes. It threw Kirsty’s lyrics into far sharper relief, with sharper being the operative word, but it also had real beauty, starkness, elegance. It seems odd now to think how rare it was to hear a record whose influences weren’t immediately obvious; especially in Brighton, where every band had a scene and every scene fairly reeked of nostalgia, it seemed entirely and fantastically out of step with what everyone else was doing. It was a record made for bedrooms, for intimacy, for privacy. It was brilliant, even if the years show a little in places when you hear it now.
When Earwig didn’t last, Kirsty and Julian formed Insides. The guitars fell away some more, much of the starkness too. The sound became warmer, more generous, full of detail; they stopped needing the climaxes, made it all about exquisite moments. They escaped pigeonholes, escaped their rejection of pigeonholes. Whereas Earwig sometimes felt as if they were pressing their foreheads against limitations – of what an indie band might sound like, of what might be technically and financially feasible – there is very little evidence of those struggles in Insides’ music and particularly in their 1993 album Euphoria, released on 4AD off-shoot Guernica.
It was somehow both more accessible and more ambitious. Its finest moments have a lightness of touch, a delight in the apparently effortless, which makes you feel a little giddy. Julian finds ways of playing far less and yet achieving far more, delicate spirals of song thrown into the air like celebratory streamers. It still feels as if Kirsty is offering an utterly withering critique of your life based upon a week of hiding in your wardrobe and reading your diaries; that’s the balance, the lemon juice with the sugar. It’s a record of literate, imaginative, frequently delectable pop music. One wonders how the hell we ever got into the position where that was some kind of radical artistic statement, but there we are.
They were still out of step, but found some kindred spirits: Disco Inferno, Seefeel, Bark Psychosis. There were common influences – Steve Reich, AR Kane, late Talk Talk – and a healthy sense of picking them to bits. They played with Slowdive, Cranes. They were championed by the aesthetes at the Melody Maker. Post-rock would become the domain of boys with effects pedals, but the possibilities seemed endless in that moment: on the other side of collapsing walls, Moving Shadow were releasing twelve-inches by Omni Trio and Foul Play; Warp Records was assembling the roster for its golden age; you could find common threads wherever you looked. A follow-up to Euphoria came in the form of Clear Skin, a single forty minute piece of glistening minimal ambient dance music initially created so they could be their own support band at a London gig.
Every fan drawn to the fringes will have favourite tales of ones that got away: great records left uncelebrated, great bands felled by circumstance. You’ll have a list yourself, and I imagine that the same factors keep cropping up. My record collection contains many, many more bands thwarted by the need to pay the leccy bill than by glamorous self-destruction or internal warfare between competing artistic visions. Insides were one of those that escaped, for the few who held them very dear; other bands in that small, loose scene likewise. Too few followed in their footsteps; the handful who did largely met a similar fate.
(As an aside, there’s a sleevenote on a record by Hood, Wetherby’s purveyors of bleakly rural post-indie and notable off-spring of that early post-rock scene, conceding that one song is “such a near perfect Disco Inferno pastiche that we nearly gave Ian Crause (DI vocalist/guitarist) a writing credit”. Tellingly, Hood ended up on that list of escaped greats too, uncompromised and unrewarded. Also tellingly, perhaps, they were similarly never very comfortable playing live, at least partly as the result of a steadfast refusal to do anything the easy way. That’s irresistible to an outsider, but I imagine it’s exhausting and ultimately dispiriting if you’re actually part of it, permanently swimming against the tide.)
We were all in our twenties then, we’re all into our fifties now. We’ve all changed. Kirsty does stage banter these days. And there’s a new Insides album, Soft Bonds. As someone who always wants to hear new music far more than old favourites, or new copies of old favourites, this is a nervous moment. The social media age makes it possible to be in touch with a scattered fanbase as never before, and Bandcamp makes it easier to sell your music directly to that fanbase, but that must come with a certain demand to meet set expectations, and a risk of being perpetually tethered to a particular point in time, to a particular version of yourselves.
But these songs are not those songs, again. They seem to flicker between extremes: minimal and maximal, soft and hard, cold and warm, natural and unnatural, under-worked and over-worked. There’s a lot of tension, released judiciously by a vocal melody or a thread of guitar, as if letting bubbles rise to the surface. The closest we get to familiarity are the book-ends: opener It Was Like This Once, It Will Be Like This Again blossoms from a vocal sung so intimately that, especially right now, you almost want to take a step backwards. It feels as if it’s still flushed with the possibilities of Euphoria. The same is true of Undressing, whose woozy gorgeousness finishes the record. Imprints, evocations.
Ghost Music, as its title suggests, is barely there at all. Just enough, no more. You feel its presence, a brush of air against your cheek, then gone again. Misericord itches restlessly, anxious and threatening, until you catch it in a certain alluring light. “You distract me…” sings Kirsty as it reaches its climax, invoking Euphoria’s Distractions, and we suddenly know where are for a moment. That flickering, that sense of a broken projector, is brought into focus by Softest Bonds Resist Resistance which whirs almost to a standstill halfway in before finding fresh life, unfurling outwards again.
Several of these songs seem to have hinges in the middle, moments at which they turn on you or away from you. Others play with vocal effects, spinning Kirsty’s voice off into the margins. Some of these things might easily be tricksy, mere studio cleverness, were it to come with more fluttering of eyelashes, but this is not a flirtatious record: rather, it requires you to peer in, to observe, to pay attention. It’ll catch you off-guard if you don’t. Insides have released some luscious, immersive music in the past, but this is something else, something new. It’s essentially quiet, often eerily spacious, yet rarely still. It isn’t restrained. It holds nothing back, but its everything is a little different to yours. It expects you to do your bit.
But it also has a bouquet of flowers hidden up its sleeve. Keen-eyed fans will note that I’ve skipped over 2000’s Sweet Tip with its warm embrace of summery jazz and songs – well, song – about fancying Damon Hill, and so do most other people. Truth is, though, that it contains a couple of their very finest moments, breezy pop songs for playing in the car with the windows open on a hot day. It has imperfections as an album, but there was something rather perfect about making a record so far removed from Euphoria: seven years had passed and that’s a long time, especially in your twenties. It was where they were then. They’d moved on. And so the second half of Soft Bonds is what really brings me the most joy, for it connects with those people too, with that band. And I hadn’t dared hope for that.
Seven-minute opus – not a word we’ve used for Insides songs til now – Subordinate begins this sudden flowering. Another hinge: it opens quietly, softly, but then Kirsty takes her vocal down down down, beyond where it’s comfortable, and the assembled cast starts imitating a howling wind to the accompaniment of rattling percussion and there are great scraping swoops of bowed double-bass, and we’re somewhere else entirely. That somewhere else is the sparsely populated territory staked out by These New Puritans’ Field of Reeds, especially its bold sense of theatrical story-telling and its willingness to waltz with the preposterous. Kirsty’s voice is joined by a male counterpart, a duet of sorts. “I always…” they intone together, drifting off to who knows where. It’s mesmerising, mystifying.
From there into Hot Warm Cool Cold which welcomes you in like a warm bath on a frosty day, light acoustic flourishes and a delicious unfurling of the record’s earlier tension. Echoes of Sweet Tip’s marvellous Blue Nimbus, with its feeling of sad and happy so you can’t tell which is which. It’s the only way to feel. A short interlude in the shape of Thin Skin and its “Hold the punk down, kick his face in” sing-song earworm. Then Half Past Four has another hinge, a moment when it appears to dive down a rabbit hole and emerge, rubbing its eyes and asking “Are we sleeeeeping?”, as a perfect piece of brightly psychedelic pop music. It is absolutely nothing like I’d imagined anything on this record would sound and I can think of no higher compliment than that. How little history matters, really, ideally.
We close with Undressing – “You’ve found your bliiisss” – with its irresistible eyes-half-open soft focus, an uneasily soothing dream from one angle, a mournful embrace of mortality from another. Like other things here, it seems to exist as a three-dimensional object; viewed from different perspectives, it’s blissful, painful, beautiful, desolate. The meaning of these songs feels liquid, shimmering in whatever light you shine upon them. What a record to have made. What a joy to listen to.
Where do they belong now? Where did they belong then? It seems as if ‘dream pop’ is the currently-favoured genre, into which they fit as badly as all of the others. It’s tempting to say that they’re off to the side somewhere, but that isn’t it. Above, that’s the word. Because what’s the point of pop music if it has to be in a little box, somewhere to the right of ‘rock’? Why shouldn’t it look down on everything else, all of those rather narrow definitions? Why can’t it be anything it wants to be, flighty and impulsive and irritable and romantic and beautiful and a bit terrifying and everything else? Why can’t it be sandpaper sometimes and velvet others? Hooks and barbs, lip gloss and warpaint, sugar and acid. Why does it have to choose? Why do we have to choose?
We don’t, of course, and records like Soft Bonds prove it. We need more of them, even now. Especially now.
Insides, then. You won’t like them.
Ian Grant