The Hard Quartet - The Hard Quartet

When we first heard about The Hard Quartet, we just knew they were the band for us. A new outfit but one made up of four very familiar voices; some of our very most favourite voices, in fact. 

As recording artists, Emmett Kelly, Stephen Malkmus, Matt Sweeney and Jim White are responsible for: The Cairo Gang, Pavement, Superwolf, Dirty Three, Chavez, the Jicks, Xylouris White and dozens more (as we discovered when talking prestigious discographies and their deepest cuts), it all really does read like our office most-played shelf and the best songs ever committed to tape.

The Hard Quartet is a coming together; four distin- guished players traversing through a wide set of tones and styles with sublime cohesion and, most notably, becoming the sum of more than their individual parts. The album is trippy and full of humour, with weird psychedelic one-liners and deliciously off-kilter melodies on one hand, then epic riffs, scuzzed-out fretwork and crunching rock mini-epics on the other. The graceful flowing between the two is hugely impressive - the first side of the record alone covering all this and more. Guitars, the noble bass and voices change song to song - aside from White who remains firmly in the driving seat behind the pig skins (well, he does actually lend his voice to Action For Military Boys), providing some extraordinarily inventive rumbles and ricocheting flashes - you can tell who is singing, but the collaboration is free-flowing, quite who might have contributed the initial idea quickly becomes irrelevant.

If you zoom in, any moment of the album sounds richly amazing. Vocally they are all relaxed and full of personality. The guitar tones are both meaty and effervescent. The drums have ingenious propulsion and a discombobulating mood like rolling thunder. When you zoom out, you see the whole tapestry: warm idiosyncrasies and brilliant songs.

As we said before we’d even heard it, we knew that this would be the band for us, we just had no idea how hard we’d fall for this superb debut LP. They joined forces and went somewhere special. An instant classic.