I should start off by explaining this is not a review. I'll leave the reportage to those in the know; those with writerly aspirations. This is more of a personal Ode to La Bête Blooms.
It is quite hard for me to start writing about Hull's La Bête Blooms without wanting to tell the story of when lead singer Dan Mawer and I first met. I spoke to him, aged 14 or 15, on the soon-to-be-defunct MSN, on a friend's account, and commended him on his musical screen name - it might have referenced The Smiths or Radiohead or possibly both, I can't remember.
A few years later we played our first sets in a pub on the outskirts of Hull for his 18th birthday. It's a pretty inconsequential story, really, and only worth telling for my own sentimental and nostalgic benefit.
Fast forward another few years and I left for South Wales to start making photographs and stop playing music. Dan gradually formed La Bête Blooms alongside James Coggin, Phill Wilson, Rebecca Hopkins and Louisa Robinson. Over the past year you will have no doubt seen them posing awkwardly (at my drunken directions) and / or drunkenly (disregarding my awkward directions) after their numerous appearances at Hull's Fruit space.
When Phill moved to Belgium, playing his last gig in September (which I (once again) drunkenly captured for posterity), he was replaced by Jack Gallagher and the band soldiered on as Hullian live favourites.
Now, again, this super-condensed history is completely unnecessary, but from where I'm standing it's quite a lot to happen in what feels like a very brief six years(?). I'll resist comparing life's changes to the flowing river they sing about on their latest single, Home, but it makes those opening lines of "Where is the life that I once knew / Gone for good, it's true" all the more pertinent.
It makes for quite an emotional and personal attachment to their music - the sign of any good band, whether they're friends or not, surely? Indeed, when first seeing the cover of their single I could have sworn it was the River Usk, with an archaic-looking Caerleon on its banks, just down the road from me (or maybe such borderline delusions say more about me than the music).
Either way, I think my own attachment and the band's control over it speaks for itself. This is an Ode to the band because, having recently read Dave Hickey's Air Guitar and with its cynicism still rattling around my head - "flurries of silent, sympathetic gestures with nothing at their heart but the memory of the music" - it sets the challenge of not writing an inadequate description of a song when really what you should do, if you're reading this or any other write up, is take four and a half minutes out of your day and just bloody listen to it, and I would strongly recommend you do so because your day would be better for it.
For me, Home brings to mind a lot of memories - very good ones, I might add, even if tinged with a certain bitter-sweetness - and I am sure that I am not alone in that. In essence the song's appeal is universal. We will all, at some point, feel very far from home, and that can feel like the best or worst thing in the world depending on your circumstances.
La Bête Blooms' new single could arguably soundtrack both instances.
Home is available for download on iTunes, Spotify and Amazon from January 30th, or you can listen right now via soundcloud below.
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