I love the fact that Hovercraft themselves have labelled this brace of songs as “The antidote to Christmas singles you didn’t know you needed.” As someone who spends their day writing about all and any music that comes my way, you can imagine that currently my inbox is full of “humorous” Christmas songs and at least five different covers of “Feliz Navidad!” (The former need to look up the word humorous in the dictionary, and if purveyors of the latter had ever seen Me First and The Gimme Gimmes playing a punked up version of that song while sporting gold lame suits, they would know that the perfect rendition already exists.)
Sorry, I digress. No, this release is seasonal only because this is where we are on the calendar, and it’s effectively two demos, brushed up and brought gently up to date via modern studio treatment, taken from Hovercraft’s earliest days, way back when. (Way back when, in this case, being the mid-nineties.)
Here, in still a fairly stripped-back and raw form, New Pine Overcoat is a breathy slice of indie-folk. Born of the Britpop era, it has the requisite vibe, but it is subtler, more seductive, and more deftly delivered than most of the bombastic, self-aggrandising swagger that emanated from that laddish era. And lyrically too, there is something more astute, more interesting going on, and that line “if you kill yourself, please send me a note, “ is both brilliantly mercurial and chillingly cold!
“Angel” is also wonderfully not quite what it seems, a melancholy reflection, a nostalgic, bitter-sweet, understated pop-memory that then runs through more upbeat grooves, before transforming into a sort of “fuck you” defiance as harsh reassessments replace those once fond memories.
Two songs that are both great in their slightly repolished but understated original form, and a taste of what was. This is the sound of one of those bands, those many thousands of bands, of whom you rightly ask…what if? The sound of bands on the cusp from every town and city across the land, the music landscape that never got sculpted for myriad reasons. Why did one band make it and another not? What would the Hovercraft story have been had they gone the distance? What would the modern popscape look like today if things had been different? We can only imagine.
Facebook
Spotify
Bandcamp
Website
