These New Puritans come with a reputation of making Joy Division look like S Club Juniors. An unfair one, but this is what happens when you combine challenging hymnal music with brutally intense electronica. And ultra-brooding photos with a sporadic release schedule which suggests many years of wrestling with the fabric of music itself, experimenting with cutting up and pasting musical notation and tapping into obscure found sounds, in an existential hunt for sounds no human has ever made before. Which is pretty much exactly happened with their new, and fifth album, Crooked Wing.
It’s their first in six years, and apparently brothers Jack and George Barnett recorded it at a studio near an industrial waste processing centre, and made field recordings in a hidden Greek Orthodox church and another in rural Essex, and compared all the patchwork of sounds and ideas like a Hieronymous Bosch painting, organised it, notated it, then deconstructed and probably then put it all in a blender and drank it.
But this is not as difficult as you’d imagine. Or at least, not as difficult as it was to make. In fact it sounds like Tears for Fears finding God, rejecting God, becoming their own God, and then rejecting that God too.
That still sounds difficult doesn’t it? Well, it kind of is but well, this is avant-garde music and if you don’t want a bit of a challenge then just go eat whatever the Spotify algorithm spoonfeeds you.
And for those who enter this album for a proper, serious experience, there’s some remarkable beauty here as well as the expected pulverising intensity. ‘Waiting’ begins the album, sung by a choirboy, apparently in a church, a beautiful organ refrain welcoming you inside. But then you realise the child is singing, ‘I am buried, I am deep underground,’ and it sends shivers down your spine.
For the most part these are often soft songs of disturbing grace, full of lilting piano, brass and strings, fragile and lovelorn, as in the tender ‘I’m Already Here’, which feels like Spiritualized in their most heavenly/high moments, only for the Church organ and bells to suggest this is a song of greeting your loved one in death: ‘Pay the boatmen well/They'll carry you/Where you need to go/Maybe you lost your way/I'm alrеady here.’
Yes it’s unsettling music. But then it’s quite unsettling being a human, isn’t it? With love and death and ITV2 to contend with.
‘A Season In Hell’ is a staggering piece of work, it pulses and shudders in its apocalyptic vision of a dark rain coming and people tied to a wheel; many a fashion show just got its edgy soundtrack and the rest of us got a good shot of Rimbaud. Old school rebel music. It leads into the dreamy ‘Industrial Love Song’ billed as a duet between These New Puritans and Caroline Polachek, it is surely the first and last song about the love between two mechanical cranes. Somehow, it’s deeply moving, about a stoic kind of love, longing and desire from a distance, total loyalty forever destined to be unconsummated, where all they can hope for is that shadow of one will fall across that of the other. And that will be enough.
Christ, why are we weeping about cranes over here?
But this is what These New Puritans do, they get under your skin. For all its intellectualism, this is music that reaches inside you like little else can.
Who are these people, These New Puritans? Well, these Barnett brothers are Southend boys who have always been ill-fitting outsiders, in the pop chart/Glasto sense, even when Albums of the Year award would pile high with the unopened letters behind their doors. They are the sons - not literally - of Aphex Twin, Philip Glass, William Blake, Massive Attack, Captain Beefheart, Scott Walker and just about every outsider musician you can think of.
While other musicians fret about their album campaigns, this lot are locked in rooms going insane trying to see God. It makes all their music weirdly reassuring, as if the times aren’t so hopeless. Some artists somewhere are enraged and madly creating and trying to change the world, one way or the other.
‘Wild Fields’ here is one of the best songs they’ve ever written. As mysterious as David Lynch’s Black Lodge and just as terrifying. Jack Barnett sings of lies and lion’s eyes, and you don’t know what it means but it sounds like vicious world to be part of, though he conjures help from somewhere in the end: ‘Come down from crystal heavens/Come down from the wild fields’.
The title track - a ‘Crooked Wing’ is an ear in These New Puritans’ world - holds the journey that the band are on, a sea-shanty heading into the unknown across a dark sea. It’s epic, restrained, eerie in its expanse of space, and quite unlike anything else being made out there. It even stops and pauses for a piano break. Before the ghostly choirs come in and a storm is ridden out beyond the horizon.
At a time when the alternative music scene is showing signs of finally coming to life again, after it had seemingly been destroyed by streaming culture, and there is adventurous, artistic music cropping up from under every rock in this rotten land, it is fitting that These New Puritans should re-emerge to lead the charge. Before they then dip away to spend another half decade recording the album for a future revolt.
Crooked Wing by These New Puritans is out now
