Albion rovers Rural motorik newcomers find themselves in a field of their own. By John Mulvey.
Modern Nature ★★★★ How To Live BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP
HOW TO describe the British countryside in sound, without resorting to folk archetypes or bucolic whimsy? It’s a tough challenge, but one worth pursuing, as Richard King’s new book on the topic, The Lark Ascending, makes clear. “At its purest, the relationship between music and landscape feels almost divine, an eternal association that resists analysis,” King writes. “[But] the relationship… is often more exasperating and conflicted than the contemplative beauty of pastoral compositions suggests.”
Jack Cooper, leader of the excellent new group Modern Nature, seems to have an innate grasp of this dilemma. For the past few years, in a variety of guises – most notably fronting Ultimate Painting and Mazes – Cooper has been making spindly indie-rock in deference to a certain unshowy school of American lo-fi. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that his most compellingly British record has been made with an Anglo-American collective in the wake of Ultimate Painting’s split: they dissolved mysteriously, after completing but not releasing their fourth album in 2018.
How To Live is more of a creative evolution than a total break from Cooper’s previous music – he still evidently loves Yo La Tengo – but there is a quiet new clarity and purpose at play: as if he’s finally located the right environment, somewhere in the lay-bys of post-urban, semi-rural Britain. He is not a sentimental poet of landscape, and privileges ambiguous hinterlands over unspoiled vistas, locating countercultural potential in hedgerows rather than remote peaks. The name Modern Nature comes from Derek Jarman’s diaries, and Jarman’s garden – rocky, unprettified, in the shadow of Dungeness nuclear power station – is a useful analogue for the aesthetic minimalism of these 10 songs.
Magick and wyrdness are, thankfully, avoided. The old straight track can be navigated, at persuasive speed, with the thrumming efficiency of Mitteleuropean motorik. Hence Footsteps, which combines the “Endlese Gerade” (“Endless line”) of the Düsseldorf school, and the dronepop hum of a New Zealand band like The Clean, with incantatory free sax from Jeff Tobias, on loan from New York’s Sunwatchers. Cooper himself is a discreet presence, a mutterer who resembles Robert Wyatt purged of high notes and quirkiness. The cumulative effect is akin to a Canterbury Neu! signed to Flying Nun, and Modern Nature more or less stay in that lane for the duration of How To Live. The narrow tonal range veers close to monotony at times, but there’s a satisfyingly stubborn focus to the album, too, as Cooper maps a trajectory away from the city, and “People fighting through the swarm”, towards some place closer to a haunt of ancient peace. An imperative to escape means constant forward momentum, even as Will Young’s percolating synths and Rupert Gillett’s cello provide a bed of tranquility for the final Devotee. “Ride to the sunset,” Cooper intones, “leave all you can behind.” A qualified free spirit, doing the best he can to achieve transcendence in compromised spaces.