Andy Bell has spent four decades making guitars sound like weather. With Ride he built walls of shimmer, and with Oasis he held down the low end while louder men took the credit. Lately he has been taking his time. ‘Common Primitives’, his second full collaboration with the Essex duo Masal, is the sound of a musician who has stopped needing to prove anything and has started listening instead.
Masal are Özlem Şimşek, whose harp and voice anchor much of the record, and Alastair Johnson, who works the synthesizers and also produced. Their 2023 meeting with Bell, ‘Tidal Love Numbers’ (Sonic Cathedral), was four long, nearly weightless pieces, the musical equivalent of lying on a floor and watching light move across a ceiling. This follow-up is built differently. Seven songs, none of them sprawling past nine minutes, each with more going on underneath. Bell has stated American jazz tenor saxophonist, Pharoah Sanders’s 1977 album ‘Pharoah’ (India Navigation), lulls him into a trance, and you can hear what that did to his approach on this record. He leans on looped guitar figures that repeat, drift, and slowly change.
The opener, “After Kâtibim,” is the emotional hinge of everything that follows. Şimşek grew up in Istanbul, and when she heard Bell’s riffs she recalled a Turkish folk melody she sang as a girl. She sang it over the top. That small, almost accidental gesture gives the album its soul. A traditional tune from a childhood bedroom meets a guitarist from Oxford, and neither one flinches. It runs only five minutes, yet it sets a tone of tenderness without sentimentality, of old songs surviving by being carried somewhere new.
“I Swear We Are Infinite” stretches past seven minutes and does what its title promises, or at least tries. One interesting note of praise is it’s easy to lose track of where the pulse began with this piece. Then comes “Yuzuki Fighting Spirit,” the longest cut at nearly nine minutes, and the name alone tells you how Bell approached the sequencing. He pieced the music together first and named the pieces afterward, so the titles read like captions scribbled on photographs found in a shoebox. They only hint and never explain.
“Soap And Water” is the shortest stretch of the first half and the plainest in spirit, a palate cleanser that feels almost domestic after the long reaches before it. Then “Tower Of Babylon,” named for American science fiction writer Ted Chiang’s novelette about building something impossibly tall, one careful layer at a time. The track climbs by accumulation, a stack of small decisions that eventually shows you how far off the ground you ultimately get. “The Morning Of The Trip,” the lead single, is where Bell describes his guitar as a waterfall, and the image holds up. The notes tumble over one another without hurry or panic, and Şimşek’s harp catches them like stones at the bottom of a stream. It is the most immediately lovely thing on the record.
Then the finale. “Rudi’s Dream – The Third Bardo” runs just over eight minutes and takes its name from a Tibetan idea about the strange state between lives, though the story behind it is funnier than the title suggests: the studio’s resident cat inspired it. The trio floors the accelerator and heads for the autobahn, and what began as meditation turns into full krautrock propulsion, motorik drums of the mind and all. After forty minutes of patience, hearing them finally stomp the pedal is a joy.
Mark Gardener, (Bell’s Ride bandmate), mastered the album at OX4 Sound, and he has given it a warmth that never turns to mush. Harp strings glint without sharpening, synths hum without smothering, and Bell’s guitars sit forward enough to feel like a person in the room. The compositions are credited jointly to Bell, Şimşek and Johnson, and the writing really does sound shared. Nobody here is the star and nobody is a guest. For an album built from loops and jams and a cat’s inspiration, that is no small thing. ‘Common Primitives’ asks very little and gives a great deal. An album expected to be playing long after the autumn has gone cold.
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