As soon as you catch sight of its bombastically out-of-context and surreal title, you get the feeling that Short Circular Walks In The Hope Valley by Pilgrim Fathers is going to be something a little different from the rock’n'roll norm. You’d be right about that, too.
Pilgrim Fathers have tumbled out of Nottingham like Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters falling bleary-eyed and visionary from a painted camper-van. The principle difference (aside from being located on the opposite side of the Atlantic) is one of hindsight – Short Circular Walks In The Hope Valley strips psychedelia of its naivete, drags it through the blacklight paranoia of the seventies and into the ironic nihilism of the nineties.
In other words, we’re talking fuzzed-up wig-out space-rock. This is the sound of Pilgrim Fathers: languid Led-Zep breaks from the drums, epic guitar riffs being cranked out in the house (or dimension) next door, synthesizer sounds snatched from an alien ballroom … and the impenetrable acid prophecies of frontman Shelf, filtered through a selection of stomp-boxes that most shoegazer guitarists would be jealous of.
Short Circular Walks In The Hope Valley is like a gallery of vignettes - a corridor of living, speaking pictures like something out of a lost Lewis Carroll novel. And while the painterly style of Pilgrim Fathers can be seen in the brushwork from one painting to the next, each scene is very different.
Take “Old Man Time In the Rivers Of Rhyme”, for example. Here Pilgrim Fathers depict an encounter with Old Nick himself by way of spooky spaces, haunted house arpeggios and bit-crunched vocals. And suddenly things take a turn for the fearsome and there’s a vast attacking wall of noise; “choirs of angels hate me because I hate them!” howls Shelf, before being tipped into the Inferno to the sound of demonic shrieks.
The pattern is set. Those moody echoing spaces will reoccur throughout Short Circular Walks In the Hope Valley, as will their crushingly huge counterparts. Pilgrim Fathers have done something strange to the loud/quiet/loud dynamics of Pixies and those that followed them; it’s not just loud/quiet but thick/thin, everything heard as if through the haze generated by a cupboard full of cough syrup, and starring a distant declamatory voice that comes from the distance like some Homeric cyclops bellowing from the top of a Martian mountain range …
I’m not describing this well … or perhaps I’m hitting the nail square on the head. It’ll sound like a cop-out, but Short Circular Walks In The Hope Valley defies easy description at the same time as it defines Pilgrim Fathers with a core sound that is both instantly recognisable and totally their own.
And they know how to have fun, too, behind the mock-magical posturing. The languid psychedelic blues of “gold, GOLD!”, the mangled Hendrixian ballad of “Dog Yoghurt”, the Clutch-on-mushrooms of “Fistful Of Bags (Full Of Riffs)” … these are songs by a band that isn’t entirely sure what it’s doing, but is absolutely certain why it’s doing it. You remember those car stickers that boy racers used to have, the ones that said “On A Mission”? Pilgrim Fathers should be wallpapered with those things.
You should go listen to Short Circular Walks In the Hope Valley. You should buy a copy, too, even if you don’t like it (in which case more fool you). Why? Because we need more bands like this right now. Pilgrim Fathers have turned their back on po-faced tough-guy metal and trekked off across the random landscapes of zonked-out rock’n'roll … and you know what they say about the road less travelled, right? Right - so get walking.
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Tags: noise, Pilgrim Fathers, prog, psychedelic, rock, rock'n'roll, shoegazer, Short Circular Walks In The Hope Valley, stoner
