Understanding Music

It's been too long a wait for the follow-up to the fabulous Victory Parts, but now it's here everything's all right. 'Understanding Music' takes off where 'VP' left off; the same chassis is there, Paul Campion's beautiful poetic lyrics delivered in heart-rending honest and forlorn fashion, Mark Raine's screaming guitars, and a bass-percussion engine room cementing the whole thing into a huge, beautiful noise. But added to this is a more refined edge, subtle use of keys and strings, and a generally less hurried feeling to the whole thing. 'Luke One' kicks things off nicely, all tremolo guitar, Rhodes piano and gated percussion, and that classic Acoustics sense of melody. 'She Kills For Kicks' opens with a curl of slide guitar, then opens up into an incessant orchestral riff reminiscent of AphexTwin's 'Boy Girl Song'or perhaps even Disintegration-era Cure, skipping along over staccato percussion and muted synth melodies, all covered in Campion's heartbroken vocals. As with most AC Acoustics songs, the lyrics aren't really literal; more a sort of stream-of-consciousness linear thing, playing with language and it's rhythms and nuances. No wonder the man's an accomplished poet too. Other stand-out tracks are the Pavement-esque 'B2', and the closer, 'Waiter Strains', which builds over its 8-minute length into an incandescent wall of feedback and clattering timpani before silence prevails. It's a relief. It's wonderful... Just don't leave it so long next time, chaps.

I have two other AC Acoustics albums, 1994's Able Treasury and 1997's Victory Parts, about which I couldn't tell you anything, offhand, other than that I enjoyed listening to them well enough that they haven't been relegated to the backup shelf. After listening to Understanding Music once I couldn't have told you anything much about it, either. A second and third pass yielded no more explicable detail. After I listened to it a fourth time and found myself still clueless, but not yet bored, I began paying closer attention. Many more sessions later, I can report with authority that I do not know how this album works, and when I try to take it apart the pieces slip right through my fingers. Although I can recognize some song-like qualities of the individual tracks while I'm listening to them, I experience the album as if all its moments are simultaneous and co-extensive. The music is bleary and shimmering, along the same path that led past MBV, Puressence, Whipping Boy and the Lassie Foundation, and Paul Campion's vocal style is even more evasive and muttering than the Simpsons'. I think this is what the people who reacted so strongly to Sigur Rós' Ágætis Byrjun hear in their music, but to me Sigur Rós' nonsense lyrics are too obvious, too cheap a way to bias the music away from objects towards liquid. The songs on Understanding Music all have real words, some of them even spoken narrations, and yet they still all blur together for me, an epic vigil against wearying coherency. "God knows my name", someone whispers, in the middle of it, and suddenly I'm almost incapacitatingly aware of how prayer-like my experience of this album has become, how detached my repetitions of it have become from anything it might be literally construed to express. This is what Kid A should have been, too, ambient suspension without giving up guitars or faith. There's no "Idioteque" here, and I would have thought a Kid A without "Idioteque" would disincorporate. Which, I suppose, is what happens. Understanding Music is just about the most pretentious album title outside of Terence Trent D'Arby or Cursive, but I feel like they've earned it, like this isn't a music lesson for me, exactly, but that in listening to it I've heard the sound of them learning something integral and profound about their relationship to music. Does it translate? I don't know. Maybe all I'll ever get out of this album is the visceral jolt of seeing, in somebody else's eyes, a spark of comprehension whose context, much less substance, neither of us can explain. But that's fine. If I suspect this record is a masterpiece merely because I have no good way to assess it, so be it. The experience is the same. I'd enjoy this album less if I thought it concealed a code. I have plenty of puzzle boxes, not enough monoliths. I grow more fond of this one, after every helpless circuit, precisely because I can't think of any other way to deal with it. With each encouraging failure I grow more confident of its indivisibility. I'm not religious, and I don't know what it means to orbit something I can't enter. I don't know if it's therapy or self-abnegation. But I think I need to find out. My world has been so well mapped, yet here is an elsewhere. Maybe I'm drawn to it for no better reason than a lack of other elsewheres, but that will do. I've been looking for a way out of myself, and the circumference of this disc, if I walk it one more time, might be the path from here to there.

Its a shame that AC Acoustics never received the type of acclaim reserved for today's corporate indie mediocrity (stand up Kings of Leon...you are the worst example). Back in the "good ol' days" when indie necessarily required some level of invention and trail-blazing in order to make an impact; when guitars were still weapons; when lyrics mattered; and when money and career weren't the reasons people got bands together, the A(uthentic) C(loset) Acoustics ploughed a lone flag-bearing furrow, making two extraordinary records (Understanding Music and Victory Parts), one hugely enjoyable record (Able Treasury), and one resignation record (O).

Sadly for them, it was a time when their sort were being forgotten in the mad corporate rush to find the new Nirvana, or the next Oasis, or any potential mass media indie-pop schmaltz. The ACs were left watching the 90s procession of nu-wave indie princes (Suede etc...I mean....who the...never mind.)

They were also in the wrong place. Mid-90s Glasgow was a goldfish bowl, and the ACs were never appreciated by their own (still trying to rid themselves of Teenage Fanclub-itis). Admittedly, they did themselves no favours by balking Scottish etiquette and pronouncing themselves "the best band in the world", and whilst such bravado would latterly do the likes of Oasis no harm, the ACs seemed to get a bit ostracized. We dont brag in Scotland, and Glasgow is an unforgiving place - not unsimilar to Manchester, you are allowed to present melancholy (TFC) and bleakness (Mogwai), self-effacement (Delgados), humour (BMX Bs), even ALL of the above (Belle & Sebastian) - but aspiration and ambition are not admirable virtues in the goldfish bowl. Thing is, at the time, the ACs probably WERE the best band in Scotland, and had the potential for much more, until the lack of success brought things to a premature end. I met singer Paul Campion in a Glasgow pub one afternoon, and he was a genuinely interesting and endearing character, who just wanted a bit more than what was in front of him.

The ACs were a far cleverer band than any of their peers (Placebo/Deus etc). Much more unpredictable, and thus more entertaining.

This is probably their best work - most accessible. Victory Parts is considerably more dangerous...try them out. They seem to be long gone now, but maybe if we show enough interest, they'll come back for an encore....