British guitar bands are in rich form right now. Black Midi, Dry Cleaning and Squid are at the forefront of this movement (to these ears, anyway) as they manage to blend a range of influences by way of homage, while also carving out new sonic territory in a field that’s already becoming saturated. Cassels could be the pick of the crop, yet are far less grandiose, less ‘arty’ (i.e. pretentious), and – sorry, chaps – less photogenic, which means their star may not blaze as bright or as high as their peers. Whereas the aforementioned bands arrived almost fully packaged and wonderfully marketable, Cassels have grown exponentially in a fascinating manner with each release. It feels like a rare treat to watch a band develop and mature these days.
Brothers Jim and Loz Beck’s third album as Cassels, A Gut Feeling, sees them move into new lyrical territory with fictional voyeurism replacing their previous confessional, personal approach. They’ve also fleshed out their minimal guitar and drums sound by incorporating a range of aural textures that complement rather than obscure. They’ve stepped away from simply trying to replicate the ferocity of their live shows, and have written a bunch of songs that are given a new lease of life with the layered production here.
A Gut Feeling opens with “Your Humble Narrator”, a thunderous squall of guitars underpinned with meticulously tight drumming that brings to mind Steve Shelley at his best. The spoken-word lyrics tell of a desire to manipulate the listener, to “Shape and mould / The innate things you can’t control” and herein lies the truth in most art – that the creator is trying to evoke a response, to coerce the recipient/consumer into a reading that matches, where possible, the intentions of the original message. The overall message you extract from A Gut Feeling is that modern life is, indeed, rubbish.
We can likely all see ourselves in “Michael’s Daily Commute”, a tale of a man crushed by the mundanity of life and the hope of a better tomorrow without the internal drive to do anything about improving his lot in life. Apathy is the curse of the modern age, my friends, and Michael is passivity personified. He wants to stay below the radar, while seething inside at the empty promises of working life. The lyrical refrain in the chorus of “Michael hopes when he’s old and grey / He’ll finally feel less afraid” bites hard, with Jim’s guitar lines delicately picking at a cascading melody that mirrors the sinking feeling in the song’s protagonist.
The fraught nature of sexuality in a “button down seaside town” is played out masterfully on “Beth’s Recurring Dream”, which beautifully, and painfully, paints a picture of a woman whose intimate desires are never to be fulfilled. “She tossed prayers into the air / As she watched them fall and smash / Onto the fair features of lovers she invented in hеr dreams” is the lyrical highlight of A Gut Feeling, and there are some real doozies across the nine tracks.
Isolation is a link across the album, whether the characters in the songs feel socially segregated or not. Even in those tracks that focus on communal being, like “Pete’s Vile Colleagues” or “Charlie Goes Skiing”, the observations made seem quasi-misanthropic. A sense of empathy is offered on “Dog Drops Bone”, but that’s for the titular creature more than a person. If you’ve ever loved a dog that was gone one day then the lyrical simplicity here might get you right in the feels.
The minutiae of life is central to A Gut Feeling – expensive lager, the persuasive nature of advertising, the introspection of postmodern life, sanitary towels, and tacit complicity are the life blood of the narrative themes herein. Cassels are drawing on the lineage of the kitchen sink narrative aspects of pop music, and lyrical influences of such chroniclers as Pulp and Blur mix with angular guitars that have more than a hint of Shellac, Future of the Left, and a range of math rock outfits. That’s not to say that Cassels sounds like any of these bands, though. They sound like Cassels, and that is at once quintessentially British in content and American in form without feeling anything other than truly authentic.
