My late mother used to love Pomegranate. I could never see the point of them. They were all seeds, and she’d sit there eating them all night.
Juicy and with plenty of seeds perhaps isn’t the feel that Cole Stacey and Joseph O’Keefe are going for, and that is not the vocabulary I was using when I first saw India Electric Co. not far off a year ago. They both opened and were the backing band for Midge Ure.
My review of their show that night included words and phrases like “ambitious”, stripped back”, “compelling” and “almost jazz”.
Listening to “Pomegranate” (and by that, I mean both the opening song here and the wider collection as a whole) and that all rings true, still.
Cole Stacey has a magnificent voice and it’s the sort of prog that Steven Wilson thought he owned.
“Embers” on the other hand, deals in scope. From its primal drums to its disorientating sounds, this is not a band that wants to be swayed from its path.
And that means that it goes into all sorts of corners. On work like “What Keeps You” it’s almost like about three different songs are going on. It shouldn’t work. Yet due to their skill, it does.
“Balancing Act” adds an electronic, near-80s pop theme, and Joseph O’Keefe’s keys work is stunning. “Better Unsaid” could be a Nik Kershaw song, but yet it’s all their own and highly original.
There are three different drummers here, across the 14 songs, but “Glass Houses” pulses thanks to Craig Sellar, “Cascade” dials up the jazz, and the piano on “Fancy Free” sounds anything but.
It’s their first album in four years, and it appears to be laced with regret. “Did you all have fun?” the last one “Face To The Sun” asks, and it doesn’t sound like it wants an answer.
The truth is there isn’t a right answer for it anyway. You could listen to “Pomegranate” 100 times and have a hundred different ones.
The only things we can say for sure about India Electric Company’s first album in four years are that it’s compelling and highly skilled.
Rating 8.5/10
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