by Rob Moura (@tapedeckpod)
Squid are a five-piece rock band from Brighton whose shape-shifting, multi- instrumental cacophony is set to install another capstone on the new wave of bands bounding out of the British Isles. The jazz blur of Black Midi and Black Country, New Road; the punky, macho bruv-ness of Fontaines DC and IDLES; the cutting candor of Porridge Radio and Dry Cleaning; everything that might come bubbling out of Speedy Wunderground or from Dan Carey’s ever- growing CV: the last few years have seen the British press declare a fleet of post-punk-adjacent yet ultimately genre-less bands as definitive of the country’s alternative scene in ways we haven’t seen attempted since... well, I’d say since since the landfill indie days, but I don’t think they ever ended. In the release of their debut album, Squid fight an uphill battle: against the weight of expectations, against universally glowing reviews for their past work, and against the throngs of brutish fans who are waiting on bated breath for the long- awaited return to the era of the chav-fronted guitar band.
Bright Green Field is likely going to alienate a good deal of these people, and you get the sense that’s how these fellows would want it. As expected, there’s nothing even remotely close to radio friendliness buried in its hour-long runtime, and its first four tracks (not counting its palate-cleansing instrumental intro) take up nearly half that time - time that’s spent pushing and pulling, building and releasing between scraggly guitar figures and measured tempo changes. Yet even outside of its outsized length - a protractedness that reads more purposeful than indulgent or jam-based - Bright Green Field would be considered a grower. Its atonal angularity takes more than a few listens to stick into the brain, and drummer/vocalist Ollie Judge’s scream-shout, catapulted from the top half of the lungs, may be an acquired taste for many.
All of this is to say that you might have to shake off a bunch of things, including your own preconceptions as well as your cynicisms about the British hype machine, to fully appreciate what Squid are doing here. When you do, you’ll find this is a hell of a record. By virtue of its grandiose arrangements and dynamic swings, it takes precedence over what space its playing in. Tracks like “Narrator” (which ends with a contracted, howling decrescendo pulled straight from the Pink Floyd playbook) and “Documentary Filmmaker” have the capacity to subsume you, capturing your attention even as its myriad lapses into ambience threaten to push it away. Rather than a casual listen, Bright Green Field is a full-on habitat, complete with its own musical language and futurist, apocalyptic point of view.
I find Carey tends to mix the color out of his bands’ instruments in favor of a certain overcast signature, but Anton Pearson and Louis Borlase break out of that mold with the acerbic interplay of their clashing guitars, like on the jittery, runaway “Paddling” and on the fantastic “2010,” which bears such a strong sense of mood and melody it feels like the record’s innate centerpiece. Cornet, synth, cello, and handfuls of miscellaneous sounds round out the experience, which despite its instrumental eclecticism settles on an unabatedly anxious feel. Judge’s lyrics, meanwhile, read dense and impressionistic on paper but are emitted with the force of conviction reserved for more didactic fare, which will make them everything or nothing depending on whose receiving them. Less political than Joe Talbot’s testy screeds, less candid than Florence Welsh’s conversational tapestries, but less mercurial than Geordie Greep’s yawped burble, Judge’s inscrutability is designed for a gut reading, allowing the sounds around him to dictate the meaning.
The record’s hidden strength lay in its tendency to subvert expectations. It may be impossible to come into this record expecting one thing without feeling a little bewilderment at how effectively its other qualities endeavor to cancel that thing out. For a band gracing the cover of NME, their proclivities toward jazz, skronk and sheer length may shave off the lads looking for a soundtrack to a pub crawl. Yet they’re not nearly as experimental as the press would suggest, in that despite all the talk about recording medieval racketts on the back half of “Boy Racers” or the swinging mics or the lines of amplifiers, they’re still a rock band playing easily identifiable rock instruments and building their songs up from a litany of formulas inescapable from unfair comparisons to post-punk. It’s that middle ground - that uncomfortable point between being recognizable to the point of pastiche and being something completely unidentifiable, where Bright Green Field resides, and therein lies an unassuming brilliance.