The God In Hackney’s The World in Air Quotes is a genre-shifting, style-melting masterpiece of alt-pop meets jazz inflected art-rock which is by turns moody, heart-wrenching & poetic. Continuously surprising in its breadth, range and focus The World In Air Quotes is essential listening for fans of Eno, Coil, The Cocteau Twins, The Durutti Column, 1980s ECM jazz…this record’s innovative progenitors are manifold but it sounds beholden to none of them.
The God In Hackney’s first album ‘Cave Moderne’ was Andrew Weatherall’s album of the year for NTS Radio.
The God In Hackney’s second LP, ‘Small Country Eclipse’, was album of 2020 for critic Sukhdev Sandhu of The Colloqium for Unpopular Culture: “Mordant music: stuttering, dread, black humour. A record that felt truly independent, beholden to no genre, out of step with all centres and signposted nodes.”
The God in Hackney is comprised of core personnel: Andy Cooke, Dan Fox, Ashley Marlowe, Nathaniel Mellors. For The World in Air Quotes, the group expanded their lineup to include American multi-instrumentalists and composers Eve Essex (Eve Essex & The Fabulous Truth, Das Audit, Peter Gordon & Love of Life Orchestra, Peter Zummo, Liturgy) and Kelly Pratt (Father John Misty, David Byrne/St Vincent, Beirut, and Lonnie Holley among many others).
The album opens with “In the Face of a New Science,” a widescreen anthem—big guitars, a horn section, urgent drums—about our changing planet, after which the band immediately switches up its palette to the electronic, dub-meets-r’n’b-meets-industrial-goes-goth of ‘Heaven & Black Water’. This is followed by the strange, oceanic ‘Bardo!’, a fusion of savage, skronking jazz and submarine-propelled breakbeats. From here on the ride takes wild turns. The album moves into a piano-led ballad about loneliness and online identity (‘In This Room’); then a saxophone quartet’s strange lament for a fallen planet (‘Red Star’); a comedic-occult industrial number about dead monarchs (‘Philip’); a road trip on which jazz-funk petrolheads confront the deafening silence of the cosmos (‘Interstate 5’); a bittersweet remembrance of friends lost in the lysergic mist of 1990s England (‘Broken Pets’); back in time to doomed fur-trappers on the snow-covered Dakotas (‘A Frozen Western’). It finishes with the absurd games of politicians, a song directly inspired by the lunatic rhetoric of a certain US administration’s lawyers (‘Non-Zero Number’).
You could say that The God in Hackney’s music has always offered an ultra-oblique, dreamlike form of social commentary. Their 2014 debut, “Cave Moderne”—named album of the year by the late, great, Andrew Weatherall—imagined contemporary society if it was still inhabited by Neanderthals. Its mordant-pop follow-up, “Small Country Eclipse,” was a record about islander mentality, about the empty nationalism of Brexit and populist politics. Now we have “The World in Air Quotes,” their most dynamic and genre-defying to date, a record which resists easy categorization, made in the innovative spirit of post-punk, in pursuit of vital and fresh sonic real-estate.
It is an album about life, death, ecology, and the sclerotic grip of a culture mired in quote, reference and deflated imagination; an ambitious attempt to break rank with format & style and build new imaginative forms for the present.
