About Group
Start And Complete
There are many surprising things indeed to be discovered in the course of listening to “Start and Complete”, the new album from About Group, but perhaps none more so than the beautifully unorthodox genesis of the band itself.
Comprising Alexis Taylor (Hot Chip), Charles Hayward (This Heat), John Coxon (Spring Heel Jack, Spiritualized) and Pat Thomas, who has played with the likes of Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley and others, the band originally formed to make a record of improvised music for the Treader label in 2009, having never played together as a whole before the day it took them to make their first album. After a clutch of live performances (supporting Gang Gang Dance, playing Ornette Coleman’s Meltdown Festival and even Glastonbury, among others) they regrouped to record this album.
Start And Complete is the highly engaging result; recorded in one day at Abbey Road, Studio 2, and mixed over three days on Conny Plank’s old desk, at Mark Ralph’s London studio. The songs were written by Taylor over the last few years and some, but not all of them, were given out as a CD in piano/vocal demo form for the other members of the group to hear a few days before the studio date. The idea was that no one band member would know the songs well enough to have specific parts, or be prevented from playing something like the first ideas that came into their head.
Tracklist
01. Married To The Sea (a)
02. Dont Worry
03. With Each New Day
04. Repair Man
05. Lay Me Down
06. A Perspective
07. There's A Way To End This Run Of Doubt
08. A Sinking Song
09. Nothing But Words
10. You're No Good
11. Rough And Smooth
12. Start And Complete
13. Dreamt I Saw You Late Last Night
14. Married To the Sea (b)
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