Whilst the world revolves in a swirling state of near paralysis, with gigs and mass gatherings consigned to the darker corners of our hopes and dreams, this current torpor desperately craves purity, beauty, honesty, truth and escape.
Manchester’s finest sons since New Order return to cast a bewitching spell over our ears and emotionally fragile souls. Typically, they haven’t assaulted our senses with kinetic funk or out loud, neon lyrics. No, they finely capture the mood in their headstrong, gossamer net, setting nature alive, reflecting on the joyful noise that any self-respecting human is appreciating more and more every day.
We walk, outside: there is less of the normal background hum and more of the sounds we take for granted; we look upwards rather than straight ahead, we catch sight of the blue hues more, the sky stretching out in every visible direction, the leaves even greener than before, even more alive, trembling in the amazement of their own existence – they want YOU to taste this immediacy.
We can take time to enjoy and absorb, pause, reflect upon the piercing call of the wren and robin, marking out their tiny territories, a tweeted protest against the encroachment of humankind, a call for action – come here, be here, now!!
This song, no more obvious a single release than the possibility of life currently returning to normality, is more of an all-embracing mood, synthetic yet intense, layers falling and forming into other layers, chord, upon chord, upon chord of experimental plainsong, building up to the point of near collapse, the crescendo distorting then almost, completely imploding, before being brought back to inhale possibility. Everything repeated, everything relit, everything reaching to grab hold of evermore.
Here lies the key to this deathless, most precious of bands. They reveal the unexpected. They love, nay adore, grappling with the boundaries of what’s allowed to happen with a post-modern pop construct. The rhythm is a pulse, the heartbeat of difference, indifference to commerciality, focusing with multi-coloured lasers on the ridiculous, naked, just born abandon of discovery and suggestion.
Everything Everything prove, in 5 minutes 39 seconds that you, listener, captive, just have to believe that everything is possible and we are here to celebrate just being. Nature is ours: let us experience it, now without judgment.
Hugh Ogilvie