The Winchester Club, Negative Liberty: Caught in the Trap
It’s virtually impossible to make it through Negative Liberty, the second full-length by five-piece instrumentalists The Winchester Club, without a Godspeed You! Black Emperor comparison coming up somewhere along the line. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, as there are certainly worse bands out there to take inspiration from, and to their credit, The Winchester Club put a particularly British grayness into the mood of the five component tracks of Negative Liberty, and they don’t sound like they’re ripping anyone off, but the influence is there and is fairly prominent. That said, the sprawl of the opening three cuts on Negative Liberty – which encompasses 40 of the album’s total 51 minutes – is bound to be driven by the various personalities of the players involved, and it is. That, coupled with the two-guitar/two-bass, xylophone-inclusive arrangements The Winchester Club have on offer, indicates that the push of a song like “R.D. Laing (Little Chemical Straightjackets)” isn’t so much to exorcise influences as to explore a sonic space. Other tracks, working in a scope that’s impressive despite being largely consistent atmospherically, follow suit, and Negative Liberty proves more than a collection of aimless instrumental jams or extended builds.
By way of an example, opener “Fuck You Buddy” reaches its apex approximately halfway through its 12:58 runtime, and the last five and a half minutes of the song are more of a contemplative investigation of the after-effects of that apex. Xylophone notes launch the track and album, but it soon takes on a different live, incorporating a Londoner’s melancholy in its striking bass work from Harry Armstrong (also guitar/vocals in End of Level Boss) and/or Elana Jane, both of whom are credited in the album’s liner. The latter also shares xylophone duties with drummer Tim Spear, who founded The Winchester Club along with guitarist and Chineseburn bandmate Jerry Deeney and guitarist Jonathan Morgan. Guitars are prominent but not really dominating throughout Negative Liberty – that is, nothing on the album is exclusively riff-led – and as “Fuck You Buddy” bleeds into the acoustic start of “The Lonely Robot” (12:41), I’m more drawn to the warmth in the bass sound than to the loneliness of the guitar notes, however melodically engaging they might be. Like all the material here, “The Lonely Robot” takes its time developing, but ultimately hits its high point even earlier into the proceedings than did “Fuck You Buddy.” That’s not a critique or putting down the structures The Winchester Club are working in. Quite the opposite. As someone who hears a lot of instrumental bands, it’s refreshing to have one come along not hell-bent on marching to the heavy part, instead getting it out of the way so the music can breathe. With the humming undercurrent of amp noise in the later parts, “The Lonely Robot” sounds full and complete, but still manages to hold onto that walking-alone ambience.
“R.D. Laing (Little Chemical Straightjackets)” begins with sampled wind and speech that asks, “Is freedom possible? Is the truth possible? Is it possible to be one’s actual self with another human being? Is it possible to be a human being anymore? Is it possible to be a person? Do persons even exist?” six times in a row, and is immediately distinguished from the surrounding songs in that. The samples (there are more later in the track and elsewhere following) come from the 2007 BBC documentary series The Trap by filmmaker Adam Curtis, from which the band have said they took inspiration – indeed, “Fuck You Buddy” and “The Lonely Robot” are the titles of the first two episodes in the series, psychiatrist R.D. Laing features prominently therein, and fourth track “The End of Liberty” and the closing title cut deal with themes brought up in the third episode. In that way, Negative Liberty can be said to be following the same progression as The Trap, but not having seen the full 180-minute series, I wouldn’t speculate on how well it does so. One expects, though, that the dreariness in The Winchester Club’s music finds a fitting source in Curtis’ work on human nature. The realists are always the most depressive lot in the bunch.
It’s the longest of Negative Liberty’s selections at 15:22 (three long episodes, get it?), but “R.D. Laing (Little Chemical Straightjackets)” is more notable for the changes in approach it makes on the part of The Winchester Club. Here they follow a more traditional build, keeping the tumult (led by feedback and Spear’s frantic tom runs) for the end of the song. “The End of History” begins with British journalist Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge espousing his hatred for the corruption in human power structures – another The Trap sample – then commences a seven-plus-minute build to another noisy finish that’s somewhat smoother and shorter than that of “R.D. Laing (Little Chemical Straightjackets),” but similarly minded nonetheless. The bass fuzz is again a highlight here, and on closer “Negative Liberty,” where it comes even more to the fore in volume swells and sporadic guitar notes. Given The Winchester Club’s penchant for structure, I’m a little surprised they didn’t bring back the xylophone for the end of “Negative Liberty,” but I guess you run the risk of overdoing it with something like that, and that instrument is tricky given how much it’s been used in heavy music. “Negative Liberty” keeps its moody drone for three and a half minutes and then cuts to silence, ending the album not so much on a high point as an afterthought. It works anyway, and from the music to the samples to the gorgeous box presentation that Exile on Mainstream has put together for it with varied finishes and imagery, Negative Liberty is as fully-realized and thematically conscious as one could possibly ask. The Winchester Club may not be revolutionary on musical terms, but I’d be lying if I said their work wasn’t completely their own – apart from the samples, obviously.
Tags: Exile on Mainstream, London, The Winchester Club, UK
