Epic 45 – Weathering – Make Mine Music – mm068 - ****

Every generation feels it witnesses the slow death of its culture. Arriving in the glens in 1773, Johnson and Boswell were advised the real highlanders disappeared twenty years earlier. And having decamped to Cornwall in the fifties, the artist Ithell Colquhoun observed an apparently vanishing way of life in her memoir The Living Stones.

Closer to home, Childhood friends Ben Holton and Rob Glover, who played their first gig as Epic 45 in a concert at their Staffordshire school in 1997, believe they are the last generation to experience real village life in their region, as former rural communities become dormitories for commuters and struggle to maintain their unique identities in the shadow of identikit housing projects. Epic 45 make hazy, electro-acoustic, evocations of the English pastoral in the tradition of Talk Talk or The Durutti Column, and very pleasant they are too. However, there's the merest suggestion of a darker theme at play on their seventh album, Weathering.
Tracks entitled People Say This Place Is Dying or With Our Backs To The City, and emotionally directional sleeve shots of abandoned cottages and a woodland viewed through a PVC window frame, give their bucolic space blues something serious to grind against. A time bomb ticks underneath the village war memorial, and so we read these chiming cyclical guitar parts, moody atmospheric samples, found sounds, and oddly distant massed vocal parts, a little differently.

Epic 45 used to invoke, inoffensively but captivatingly, a nostalgically fictional English idyll. But now there seems to be something at stake, Weathering strikes deeper and more resonant notes.

(17/7/11)