Meet the North Yorkshire lad nostalgic for the far-off golden age of, um, three years ago
Hometown: Ripon.
The lineup: Joel Hood (vocals, music).
The background: Joel Hood is a 28-year-old who makes, as he puts it, "Not very danceable dance music from the north of England". There are echoes in his music - which he only began making last summer using, he says, "a couple of old keyboards from eBay and a drum machine on extended loan from a friend" - of the blissed-out house of the Beloved. Think also of New Order's mismatch of the mordant and the piercingly poignant: Hood has a track called Pissholes in the Snow that made us remember Bernard Sumner singing, "You caught me at a bad time, so why don't you piss off?" Maybe it's a northern thing.
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Actually, more than miserablist techno Joel Hood's music casts back to more recent developments from Sweden and America. Just as he acquired the equipment to make it possible, he discovered the architects of the sound he wanted to make: Air France, a duo from Gothenburg whose CD Hood had in his car. One malfunction later and he was hooked. "The CD player in my car started playing up and refused to eject the Air France CD that I had in there," he explains. "As a result I fell completely in love with their music and they turned out to be the soundtrack of my summer and beyond." Their breezy, beauteous beat pop is all over Hood's tracks, as is the smeary, bleary feel of the Avalanches. And so is the sound of US laptop pop circa 2009-2010 and latterday exponents of chillwave such as Work Drugs. If you can get your mind round this, it's music evoking nostalgia for music that was nostalgic for music that was itself nostalgic, music that seemed to long for a summer that may have only ever been a chimera in the first place.
It's all over the tracks on his SoundCloud. Getaway Car will either make you recoil or reduce you to raptures. Hood's voice, similarly, will either annoy or enchant. It is the merest echo of something more full-bodied. Certainly, in his listless yearning he doesn't sound as though he comes from North Yorkshire. On Follow the Fool he sound entranced by the realisation that he can - using those old keyboards and that rickety drum machine - create such a lovely sound: like a spectral version of Donald Byrd's Love Has Come Around. Campanero is also disco-ish: disco from the other side, from the ether. Teardrops is not the Womack and Womack song, but the words to the latter ("And the music don't feel like it did when I felt it with you") is utterly appropriate. It is awesomely pretty, but the prettiness is deceptive. There is an emotional charge to these depthless evocations.
The buzz: "Heartbreaking dreampop from northern England."
The truth: Spectral disco at its finest.
Most likely to: Make you dance.
Least likely to: Work for Air France.
What to buy: An EP will be issued, possibly by Sunday Best, in the new year.
File next to: Air France, the Beloved, Tropics, Work Drugs.
Links: facebook.com/joelhoodinnit.
Thursday's new band: Molly Beanland.
by Paul Lester via Music: Electronic music | theguardian.com
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