Nostalgia and memory play a big part in music. Over time, the boring bits get edited out, and what remains often becomes a heightened and cherished version of events. And that gets to the heart of how music works. It doesn’t matter what actually happened; what matters is how you feel about it. Gigs at the local church hall take on the relevance of shows at Madison Square Garden; audience sing-alongs become the voices of thousands, and people, places, events, and experiences pass into myth. Reality is unimportant; perception is everything; facts don’t matter; feelings do…and I know, I’ve been there too.
And this is just one of the reasons that The Rotor Delta has released someone else’s album. Okay, that’s not quite true, although Jimmy Green continues to put out new music under that moniker, Sola: The Tape Recordings (1998) is a document of his first band, the sound of a 21-year-old in the late ’90s taking his first steps into the big, wide world of music. It’s also pretty much the sound as it happened, with minimal polish and nothing significant added to those original recordings.
But nostalgia is only part of it. The main reason for releasing this album now is surely that the songs are flippin’ great and should be preserved for the wider public, not just for personal reasons. As the horrors of Brit-pop faded and indie music became a dominant force, this is the sound of a band navigating toward the imminent guitar rock revival that they sadly never got to be part of. Timing is everything; they would have fitted right in.
‘Feel Alive’ sits where worlds collide; the echo of US bands such as Gin Blossoms or Soul Asylum runs through a very British, very dense, very squalling soundscape. ‘Start Again’ is again a place of merging mayhem as psychedelic vibes wash through garage band land and, by contrast, ‘Blue and Yellow Butterfly’ is a wonky, shonky Kinks in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland touch of madness.
‘Blown Away’ explores that impossible place where punk drank too deeply from the hippy well, a song both big and bombastic but also sweet and seductive; ‘Learning To Fly’ is liquid and lysergic, showing the band’s ability to wield space and atmosphere just as effectively as they could titanic sonic forces; and ‘Set It Free’ is the big finish and song that starts almost in trippy, folk rock territory and is slowly dragged into the kaleidoscopic and contrasting worlds of the likes of Spiritualized or The Brian Jonestown Massacre.
I’m sure everyone thinks this of their earliest efforts, but Sola could be described as one of those great lost bands. If this collection of songs is a remarkably intriguing first chapter, it is the book that never got written, which is something that might keep you awake at night – perhaps not for long, but in my mind, in that space, something epic could have happened.
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