Ugly - The South Facade Review
Ugly’s debut album finds six musicians making room for one another across intricate art-rock arrangements full of joy, silliness and humour.
A spinning yarn of uniquely niche indie rock, Ugly have slowly become one of Britain's compelling singular guitar bands. Emerging from the grassroots of Cambridge's Buttery post-2016, before soon finding themselves on the spindle of London's Windmill scene, this six-piece art-rock outfit have been brewing for quite some time.
Considered as a roaring entry, 2024's breakout EP Twice Around the Sun got plenty of runtime. The airy whimsy of ‘Hands Of Man’ or the blooming lead of ‘Icy Windy Sky’ pushed the confines of indie rock that year with restless guitars and delicate vocal concord. But their debut album goes beyond that altogether. It pushes the boundaries of the band itself.
South Facade here, their debut album, unpacks the band's methods, dresses them down and weaves them back together in an intricate lacing of folk mastery. From purely improvised jams to locked-in riff loops, Ugly's debut comes from a place of looking inward and finding the key. For the six of Samuel Goater, Harrison Jones, Tom Lane, Harry Shapiro, Jasmine Miller-Sauchella and Theo Guttenplan here, it was essentially starting from scratch. On ‘Marina’, Jasmine notes ‘In the dark everything becomes clear’, perhaps words they lived by during their time before giving them a permanent place on the record.
Unearthed through writing retreats in converted barns, rehearsal studio downtimes and late-night living room sessions, Ugly counter the thesis of too many ideas from six personalities and turn into a cohesive unit all working with one another. For most of it, there are a lot of moving parts. From overlapping harmonies, jangly guitars mirroring one another like synchronised swimmers to arching synth splurges, there's a lot happening. But each part is distinctive and doesn't encroach on the others.
Enamoured by the gleaming presence of '60s and '70s icons from Steely Dan to Gentle Giant, they trace history finding their sound. With Ugly, it's all about being intricate. The extension of a hold and a release, say. Or allowing the other instruments to argue with one another and equally make up with one another in the same refrain. Even when isolated, the vocal arrangements are not blasting their way through the mix. They sit atop everything like a cloud. At other times, however, the songs teeter on dissonance, as this tension bubbles before another member calms the panic: it's all about give and take.
And I think it's this compromise that makes the music of Ugly so devilishly compelling.
The record starts, most fittingly, where it started. Born out of their first writing session two and a half years ago, ‘Wasteland’ is a spiralling start to a project and the journey it takes you on. ‘Marina’ is a beautiful art-rock intonation of everything you need to look for from a band starting out. Fresh, impressive and the band at their most decisive.
A shapeshifting marvel, ‘Nat Cora & The Nations’ draws inspiration from new wave mystique as the groove bounds gracefully throughout. A darker turn, ‘Die Another Day’ instils the form of '90s rock with an Ugly nuance that remains ever so their own. An intertwining motif successfully passes from person to person in the main section; another demonstration of each musician knowing their place here.
Partially conceived during a one-off rehearsal, the title track here seems to present, in part, the main aesthetic aims of this project as a whole. Naturalistic flairs surround this deeply intricate song, flaked with jazz augmentations. Piano stabs revolve around a rootless ringtone chime while those snare buzzes scratch the brain just right. Not forgetting Harry's exemplary output here on bass. A revitalised archived note was the meet-cute story behind ‘Gallowine’ making an appearance on their debut record. Plonking pianos and gleeful animations from Harrison's guitar work make for a song that doesn't, for want of a better word, feel complete. But perhaps ‘Gallowine’ is merely an hors d'oeuvre for the album's close.
What started out as an eight-minute prog track, which was thankfully chopped, brings the final entry on this record. A firm favourite for its dizzyingly complicated guitar noodling and its sprawling finale, ‘Orance’ is a positively charming but oddly unsettling feat of brilliance for a band to bow out to on their debut.
All throughout, there's just this dazzling display of complex instrumentation while the vocal harmonies articulate in waves, take stock or don't fill the space at all. And at its heart are six of the most innovative musicians to emerge out of South London right now. Reputable songwriting aside, it's a record that is wrought with joy, silliness and humour. Which, once the noise has all died down, is what it's all about.
Art-rock, thanks to its players, continues to evolve and move forward and Ugly are an artist worth treasuring every drop of. South Facade here is deserving of all plaudits.