REVIEW: Six By Seven, The Closer You Get (Mantra/Beggars Banquet)
- Paul Andersen
If you are looking for soft, seductive candlelight music, steer as far away as you can from this album. It is not for the light-hearted. However, if you want to experience some of Britain's finest angst, awash in a loud, angry mix meant to assault the senses (like the Stooges or the MC5's, this is music best experienced LOUD), juxtaposed with moments of quiet and space thrown in that are every bit as fierce, then you are in luck.
Six By Seven, a quintet of lads from Nottingham, England, are pissed off. When Chris Olley rants "if you eat junk/you become junk," he's not talking in allegories. He means it. The allegories arrive in "One Easy Ship Away," when he sings, "I'm not sad now putting a gun to my head. . . I feel hope now with my head down on this track." Here the words take a forked road: is it a song about suicide, or about survival in a messed-up world? Lay your money down on the latter, because hopefulness, however dark things may appear, emerges on a number of tracks. Six By Seven is committed to seeing it through to the end.
Throughout, the music is full of scorch-the-paint-off-the-walls guitars and swirling Hammond organisms. Epic in scope, the songs are actually shorter pieces than on their excellent 1998 debut, The Things We Make. That album came out on Interscope here in the States, but the band got dropped amongst all the fallout from Universal consolidating their new labels into a corporate mess. Dusting themselves off after taking it on the chin, The Closer You Get shows a band standing strong, thumbing their noses at the world. It will take more than record company tomfoolery to knock them off their track.
