- Green Velvet once said to me "Sometimes, I want to leave my body, and float away". I think he was talking to me anyway, but the possibility exists that he was aiming it at one of the other 300 people in the club. Regardless, a good proportion of us agreed with him and demonstrated it by closing our eyes and contracting our muscles rhythmically until we were covered in sweat. That's one way to leave your body.
Another way is to lie back in your living room, close your eyes, and listen to music that washes over you in slow heavy tides of sound until it carries you away from the heavy physicality of the beanbag you're lying on and to a more translucent kind of place.
Working for a Nuclear Free City are certainly aiming to make closed eyes, floating away music, but haven't quite decided if they’re going for the sweaty physical kind or the opiate-addled drifty sort. Opening track 'The 224th Day' suggests the latter with a pleasantly dreamy beatless meander, but it soon becomes clear that this is intended only as a preamble to the pub-techno lurch of 'Troubled Son'.
This second track, which is the most immediately arresting on the album, sounds a little like the Stone Roses covering Suburban Knight with its baggy bassline, Mancunian swagger and 'trippy' washed out vocals. But I can't help but feel that this type of genre-splicing is a little redundant post-DFA. The drum machine track sounds pasted on and has that clunky early-90s rock-techno crossover feel. They nearly get away with it, but later on in the album it becomes actively embarrassing on 'Dead Fingers Talking' and 'Innocence', which come across like goth shoegazers Curve fronted by Ian Brown (this is not a good thing).
The dreamy 90-second interludes which lack the amateurish drum programming are much more successful, demonstrating a nice touch for atmosphere. This is also in evidence on quieter songs such as 'Quiet Place' and 'Over' - the jangling wistful guitars are evocative and the structure makes good use of repetition to induce a pleasant ache in the chest area. The vocals, however, somewhat ruin the effect sounding simultaneously pretentious and insincere: 'across the limestone shifting sands' is the worst kind of Oasis style doggerel.
The band should be lauded for the ambitiousness of this project - trying to crack two widely different styles on your debut album is not easy. However they seem a more than a little constrained by their influences, which are far too apparent (Mancunian shoegaze, Spiritualized and Primal Scream being the most evident). If you have a great appetite for these types of music, particularly if you are a Stone Roses fan (as far far too many people seem to be), this may not be a problem, but for me I'd rather just break out my worn copy of 'Lazer Guided Melodies' and join Cajmere on the astral plane.