Oral Habit - A Broken Chord Review
Brighton trio paint the garage psychedelic on a tight, thrilling and restless debut.
Live buzz can be a poisoned chalice. A burgeoning reputation built on the sweat of chaotic gigs in dark basements across the country can be killed as quickly as it blossoms. Songs that sound “vital” or “urgent”, or whichever cliched way of summarising excitement you prefer, can see their mystique unceremoniously stripped under the studio lights of a recorded debut. Ever one step left of their contemporaries, this is of no such concern for Oral Habit.
The Brighton three piece have garnered momentum off the back of their thrilling live shows, short sets packed with psych-drenched garage rock that veers towards freakbeat and Krautrock. Two EP’s offered the first glimpse that this energy would successfully translate to record. Last year’s Garage Frock in particular established the trio as one to watch, with stand out single ‘Sauerkraut’ placing high on our favourite songs of the year.
A Broken Chord, their full length debut via independent Cornish label Krautpop!, not only delivers on this promise but is packed with enough left turns to send you circling. It’s a concise, whirlwind summary of what Oral Habit are all about, and what they can still yet become.
Your attention is commanded straight from the opener. 51 seconds of jarred bursts of noise and fuzzed out spoken word musings culminate in the first three letters of the alphabet being stated with menace and purpose. Before you’ve managed to wrap your head around the chaos, you are plunged straight into ‘Surface Breaker’, the Oral Habit calling card. A whirling dervish of riffs that switch effortlessly from twinkly and anticipatory to sludgy and defiant, never missing a beat as the tempo shifts to and fro.
It’s a style that is emblematic of Oral Habit, and one they wear well. ‘Faux Fidelity''s tempo refuses to sit still atop a bed of beat changes and skittish guitars, equally bluesy as they are psychedelic. ‘Chekov,’ an album highlight, builds a snake-like highway before falling off the cliff with a huge fuzzed out garage rock finale. If you’ve seen Oral Habit before, these are the tracks you’d expect on the record. Rollicking riffs that never settle, and welcome reminders of what makes them such an arresting live act.
But A Broken Chord wouldn’t be the engrossing debut it is if it felt comfortable within such parameters. ‘Thin Trippin’ and ‘The Glove’ carry a slight Queens Of The Stone Age edge, taking down the pace a tad without ever feeling like a genuine pause for breath. ‘Do The Dog’ barely breaks a minute and a half, but delivers enough washed out spiky punk to leave you reaching to repeat instantly. As soon as you think you’ve got the measure of the record, the organ-led melancholy of ‘Crooner & Moon’ wraps everything up in a poignant package, striking a gentle balance between defiance and restraint.
It strikes the same chord as the entire record, in that it refuses to over indulge itself. Production is intentionally raw and ideas are given a short window to present themselves. Some naturally hit more than others, but it results in a debut that wants to be more than just a victory lap for the preceding years. On A Broken Chord, you’re hearing a band broaden their horizons without ever losing sight of what has made them such an alluring act to date.
Few can readily translate the immediacy of their live shows to a debut record, yet Oral Habit have done so, and with aplomb. You’re not permitted time to dwell on what you’ve just heard before the next right angled turn forces you down a different road. The end result is a first full length that invites you to come back and listen again to delight in the chaos and enjoy the promise of more tantalising surprises to come down the line.