Music / Reviews
Review: India Electric Co., Folk House – ‘Jaw-dropping, life-affirming, heart-swelling’
Watching a band change and grow is a fascinating thing.
Over the course of ten years and three albums, India Electric Co. have gone from a quirky, off-beat folk duo to a band capable of writing some of the finest alt-pop you’ll ever hear. They’ve gone from acoustic tunes flecked with European influences to multi-layered, complex, clever, soulful, jazzy gloriousness.
It’s been a bit like watching an interesting, fuzzy, stripy caterpillar turning into a butterfly of quite staggering beauty.
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The original duo are Cole Stacey and Joseph O’Keefe, one a consummate front man with a silken voice capable of raising goosebumps with the merest flicker, the other a musical genius. They are joined, now, by Russell Field on drums; a perma-smiling member of Midge Ure’s touring band, he is all jittery jazz angles and rock-solid foundations.
The trio;s latest release has landed at number 32 in the official Folk Albums Chart – photo: Coal Poet Media
It has taken India Electric Co. four years to record and tour their latest album, the utterly wonderful Pomegranate, and this Bristol show is the penultimate one of a long tour. You can feel Stacey’s relief at shaking himself free of the chrysalis.
The title track of that recent album is multi-layered with jazzy drums and an insistent piano, Stacey’s voice the glittering ruby at the heart of it. This is pop music that few can dream of making; influenced by those brilliant, soulful Scottish pop bands of the 80s (Blue Nile, Love & Money et al) but wholly, beautifully modern.
On What Keeps You they pack folk, pop and a love of faraway lands into four perfect minutes. Stacey’s vocals are little sunbursts over the rattling drums and O’Keefe’s synth, choruses arriving like events, laid out on jewelled rugs.
Glass Houses, too, feels special, as it builds to an ecstasy of handclaps. Drums and piano rolling together as Stacey’s voice brings the house down. His voice is an extraordinary thing really, it has a velveteen soul power but is coated with a folk patina, cracked and aged.
The Bristol date came at the end of a long tour to celebrate acclaimed album Pomegranate – photo: Gavin McNamara
Perhaps it is with After the Flood that everything makes sense. Slower and gentler, it is epic in its scale. It feels like the sort of song that should be in a West End show, the song that reveals the sensitivity of the leading man.
It has the high ceilings of a New York loft, the sweep of the Thames on a summer evening. It’s massive. And glorious. Cascade, too, has a feel of super-smart musical theatre (think Tick, Tick Boom).
Every now and then bits of the old folk-ishness peek through and that, largely, is down to O’Keefe. His violin on Without Lisa is brilliant; pastoral, lush and delightfully birdlike, it carries echoes of all that is best about English Folk, like finding an old conker in a coat pocket.
On Only Waiting that violin sets up a Muezzin wail, a call to prayer that mixes with the chatter of a crowded bazaar. At one stage he has an accordion strapped to his chest, reaches over it to dash out an elegant run on his piano, then goes back to his squeezebox melody. As I say, the man’s a genius.
With all of this fantastic songwriting it almost seems ridiculous to throw in a couple of cover versions but India Electric Co simply take two songs and make them their own.
Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game loses its rockabilly twang and finds an irresistible groove while Springsteen’s I’m on Fire becomes shimmery, wracked and sensitive. It’s been said before, but their version is about a million times better than the macho original.
On a day when tens of thousands of people were trying to navigate a rip-off website to buy tickets for one of the most boring bands on earth, India Electric Co were making pop music as jaw-dropping, as life-affirming, as heart-swelling as anyone. They might not have an audience full of glowing wristbands but they’ve got songs to die for.
Main image: Gavin McNamara
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