Hookers Green No.1 – 'On How the Illustrious Captain Moon Won the War for Us' (Snowstorm)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
For a start, that's the name of a very precise shade of watercolour paint they've stolen for their moniker, not a particularly prostitute-plentiful patch of greenery. And it's not the oddest thing about this lengthily titled, inarguably wonderful piece of work either. In fact, it's probably the easiest bit to get your head around. It's a curious creation, but a splendid one also.
It's not strictly as if this is like nothing you've heard before. You can spot nods to the likes of The Flaming Lips, The Arcade Fire and the instrumental peaks on Badly Drawn Boy's debut. But these are nods, not overfriendly, tight gripped invasive handshakes. No pinching. These Hookers know the score, they're just running with it, stretching it out, bashing it to pieces and putting it back together in a weird order.
A largely instrumental order at that - any words you hear act like rare, enticing whispers to follow, drowned in fuzz and fog, nothing so blatant as a dialogue which would actually give you any clue as to what's going on. Forget all about that. '...Captain Moon' is about the aura (to use a word which, come to think of it, actually isn't too hippy for this context after all), that lightness in the head you get when listening to it. Beneath that trickery, there are a couple of almost proper pop songs, the opening 'Love Ballad for the Cold Robot' for one, the hauntingly surreal 'The Sad and the Dark' for two.
But those are your pair - anything else here and you're getting the real treats, the drawn out, perplexing and beautiful soundscapes which swan around your ears without a care for whether they've heard anything like it before, the prolonged chords that stretch behind the bleating of a singular electronic drum wandering off into the unknown. This can be raucous and uncharacteristically toe tapping as on the marvellously disjointed 'The Strode Adventure', uneasily stark as you become 'Stuck in the Belly of a Shark' or backed by some bonkers percussion when you reach the closing title track. That percussion though, that flat, crazy, fantastically metallic thud that manically pops its head up everywhere, the clatter that pins the rest of the floating disarray together, that's a unique quality.
And the brass, of course. There's brass all over it, like a rash. But you can scratch this one - put your nails against it, rub away. It feels good. You'll swear you're hearing someone playing a conch at one point. Don't you feel a long way away from anywhere else, nonetheless content with wherever it is you are? Revel in the clutter. Comfortable doesn't have to mean melody, it needn't mean hooks. It's a state of mind - one, on this evidence, that you can quite blissfully reach by indulging in a bout of mess and confusion.
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