The Beautiful Girls -Spooks

Thu 19th Aug, 2010 in Music Reviews

What do you do when you’ve made a bona fide hit record? If you’re someone like Mat McHugh you take time out from your day job to record a solo album, then get the band back together before becoming a virtual recluse in your home studio on the beach. Basically, Ziggurats was always going to be a hard act for The Beautiful Girls to follow.

Spooks is a record where Mat McHugh does a Billy Corgan, because while he sampled drummer Bruce Braybrooke’s handiwork, he ended up playing most of the other instruments himself including bass, guitars and keys. He ended up discarding 30 songs leaving 11 that sound like a full band at work. At times the result is ambitious and busy because it brims with so many different genres and sonic elements. In a lesser group’s hands it would’ve sunk under its sheer weight, although that’s not to say that Spooks doesn’t have moments when it’s a difficult listen and where it simply flounders in the rich depths of overcomplicated music.

The most idiosyncratic song of the mix is the eight-minute pastiche known as Home/Family. Beginning life as a warm embrace to folk roots and the kind of fine guitar licks that make Eric Clapton proud, it then veers off at the 3:40 minute mark. The destination is some strange, spacey synth a million light years away from your expected finish line. Picking up on a similar tangent is – as the title suggests – My Mind Is An Echo Chamber.

Perhaps we should’ve seen the signs of richness of genres and splendour to come in the opening song, Spooks. It boasts admissions like, “I’m not really with that mainstream thing…If you don’t play my stuff on the radio it’s gonna be heard”. This approach has boded well for McHugh and Co in the past, leading to appropriate comparisons between the group and artists like Ben Harper and Jack Johnson.

McHugh seems a little conflicted on this record. On the one hand he grapples with relationships ( After All This Time ) and love ( B Some Melody ). But his other lyrical subjects include: modern guilt ( Gratitude ) and the noxiousness of fame and the songs he’s expected to write like the rip-roaring party, Don’t Wait.

On Spooks The Beautiful Girls pull out all the stops, taking in dub plus the ska and brass synonymous with a group like The Specials and adding some grungy guitar work that could have been lifted from almost any indie band tinkering away in their garage. Lyrically it takes in the desire to say something like The Clash while also maintaining the honest spirit of Bob Marley, et al. There are skittish guitars and rich production values across the multitude of genres on offer and at times this is executed with great aplomb. However, at other moments it just feels like it bites off a little too much and is all too difficult. So in short, it’s a solid effort and reasonable follow-up to the behemoth, Ziggurats.