Tom Vek - 'We Have Sound' (Tummy Touch)
4/5
By: Toby L
The fledgling electroid/solo home-programmer is a title and bracket typically confined to the more out there of genre affirmers, the Kieran Hebdens and Richard D James' amongst us. Yet in a melting-pot of indie dancefloor, garage-recorded delirium, early-twenty-something Tom Vek has happily forged a debut of ten seriously steely and icy modern gems to keep the David Byrne parallels raging in fine fettle for some months yet.
But the ambition of 'We Have Sound' is not to be unmistaken, nor devalued. Concise, rabid and genuinely infectious, each of Vek's boisterous, twisted-pop jams keep fine pace and momentum throughout, disclosing influence, yet offering plenty of hi-fi resilience and aesthetic amidst lo-fi finesse (and budgets), and seeming resoundingly assured all the while.
Finest of all is perhaps our opener - 'C-C (You Set The Fire In Me)'; an offbeat and whirring, organ-based slow-burner that builds with foreboding, nagging precedence before collapsing into the chugging guitar strikes of 'I Ain't Saying My Goodbyes' - itself already a veritable club anthem in the more choice London dinge-holes. It's a favourable entrance. Talking Heads-isms rear their selves in the thudding slap-bass sex-pest that is 'If You Want', whilst the sheer urgency and faux-spook of 'If I Had Changed My Mind', and Vek's affected baritone vox, make for stop-start genius.
In all this enchantingly unanticipated songcraft, however, we get the beauteous notion that our Tom isn't totally adverse to the ideal of messing with shit - 'Nothing But Green Lights' is a sparse, chorus-less voyage into the unknown, and just as uncertain as to where it'll lead as us seems Vek himself; through way of clinking, clanking synths and keys, and some severe percussion, we're led nowhere slowly, as it drops somewhat dissentingly after some minutes. In its perverse, heroic lack of adherence, however, the joy is found.
Closing on a refined, elegant and creeping 'That Can Be Arranged', 'We Have Sound' proves itself a glorious celebration and rousing stamp of its very title. Muddily recorded, dapper-suit sharp, and somehow easily distracted, and still whiffing of early days, Tom Vek just might repeatedly triumph in his potentially considerable years to come.
Artists in this article: Tom Vek
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