Humdrum : Every Heaven
Slumberland Records
Vinyl | CD
Released 18th October 2024
Chicago dream poppers HUMDRUM’s debut album Every Heaven is a joyous and sprightly affair crammed with memorable hooks and chiming jangly guitars galore – conjuring up the very best of the 1980s-90s UK indie. Climb aboard for the ride and revisit the heady days when cassette tapes, 7″ flexi-discs and crudely xeroxed DIY fanzines were king.
There was much that was equally feted and maligned about 1980s indie pop in the UK. On the one hand, music papers such as the NME (and to a lesser extent the Melody Maker) were all complicit in either championing – or dismissing – many of the bands who emerged around the middle of the decade on labels such as Cherry Red, The Subway Organization, 53rd and 3rd, Ron Johnson, and, most notably two in particular which left a lasting impression (practically creating sub-genres in their own right): Creation and Sarah Records.
It is with the latter label that a certain Loren Vanderbilt III, guitar-toting UK indiepop obsessive from Stateside Chicago, developed a lifelong love affair and decided to embrace the musical legacy of some of its finest and most influential acts when forming his own band Star Tropics in 2012.
Taking their name from the 1990s Nintendo action adventure video game, he assembled a three piece pop outfit specifically in tribute to those Sarah bands he adored and revered such as The Field Mice, St Christopher, Blueboy, Another Sunny Day, The Sea Urchins and others, along with more than a few nods to late 1980s and early 1990s bands from the shoegazing era, as well as, inevitably, a few Factory bands, most notably The Railway Children and The Wake (who also later ended up on Sarah Records) during their late 1980s heyday.
Star Tropics released just three singles between 2012 and 2015 and one promising album Lost World in 2017, filled with pleasant jangle-pop homages to the late 1980s UK indie scene (one track was actually titled Another Sunny Day!) and then seemingly vanished into the ether. But in 2019 they unexpectedly returned with one more new song The Other Side Of Midnight – a gorgeously melodic, guitar and keyboard driven paean to escapism whose title is a sneaky two-way tribute to Granada Television presenter Tony Wilson’s eponymous late night arts programme of the 1980s, as well as his record label Factory.
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Sadly the global Covid pandemic of 2020 effectively scuppered any further new music or outings from Star Tropics and the band fizzled out, thus never fulfilling their potential. Undeterred, after reconsidering his options, Loren continued to write whilst dreaming of being forever locked in that golden musical timewarp of 1986 to 1988 as a means of escapism from the increasingly troubled real world outside, and eventually he returned with a new project – effectively a solo venture – called Humdrum in 2022.
Quietly sneaking back into the fray, he shared two new songs, Superbloom and Wave Goodbye, which exhibited even more of the effervescent spirit of the best of those Sarah Records bands. The former – pure energetic and vivacious indie pop propelled by some lively drums with yet more lashings of chiming REM-like guitars – comes across like a turbo-charged Another Sunny Day (them again!) whilst the latter harks back to his own previous Star Tropics but this time with a far more accomplished production.
After an extended period of gestation, those two songs are now augmented by a further eight bright-eyed and perfectly-formed siblings hatched from the same incubator, and each and every one of them is an absolute unabashed gem. Words of bittersweet love and loss, longing and escapism, as well as ruminations on life’s manifold mysteries and challenges, are all married to the sharpest, breeziest and most addictive and tuneful of arrangements. Everything now sounds far more assured and confident (where Star Tropics’ early songs were slightly more unassuming and low key) and Loren’s knack for songwriting is such that once one of these songs gets lodged in your ears, it’s hard to shake the thing off!
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Every Heaven opens with the eponymous title track (also incidentally the name of an EP by former noisenik shoegazers-turned-eclectic-pop-alchemists The Boo Radleys) – a brief instrumental 1.41 minutes in length, which sets the tone for what’s to follow. It’s a great curtain raiser of sorts which ends with an unexpected sample of a woman’s voice asking the question: ‘what is it about this place? It’s like another world!’ And indeed it may well be – another world where the clock has slipped back to 1989, life seemed a heck of lot sweeter than it does now, and there was all that brilliant euphoric music in which we could wallow. Yes, give ME a time machine that does just that and I will also be the happiest man alive forevermore.
Terse snappy drums usher in track two There And Back Again with a shimmering liquid guitar sound that is straight out of the John Squire book and the song comes across like the most unexpected amalgam imaginable: effectively She Bangs The Drums by the Roses but with vocals from Loren that in turn recalls those of Caesar from former Factory/Sarah records stalwarts The Wake. This is one hell of an addictive earworm and we’re only onto the second song.
Next up, the aforementioned pairing of Superbloom and Wave Goodbye maintain the brisk momentum of this first half before the fifth track Test Of Time drops the tempo somewhat and is the first number that really recalls Loren’s infatuation with the entire class of the late 80s jangle pop bands, showcasing as it does various nods to The Field Mice, The Pastels, Teenage Fanclub, The Orchids, The Bodines and even NY’s own 10,000 Maniacs.
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The second half continues right where the first left off without missing a heartbeat – with more energetic drums and the sparkling guitars of See Through You, which owes more than a tip of the hat to an embryonic Pale Saints (as heard on their first demo tape before they went all wayward and eccentric) and with a refrain that even brings to mind Wire’s Dot Dash.
One of the album’s best tracks (which in the context of this album is a bit like saying which diamond on display dazzles more than the others) follows: Eternal Blue, which reprises the keyboards from Star Tropics’ Other Side Of Midnight, but soon unfurls like a clutch of new spring flowers into a sumptuous euphony where once again you find yourself with your eyes closed, lost in a smiling reverie of nostalgic reflection. There’s a wide-eyed and joyful optimism every time the chorus line ‘counting the days away until I’m with you / chasing the sun around, an eternal blue’ comes around. It’s simply exquisite. This is also the longest track on the album at just over 5 minutes, but it sure doesn’t feel like it as it’s over all too quickly!
Things are no less nagging and infectious on the remaining three tracks: Ultraviolet, though at a slightly slower pace to the others, again sounds like it could have come from the great lost album by The Wake that never was (when they were on Sarah Records between 1989 and 1994), whilst Come And Get Me returns back to the more spirited tempo of much of the other numbers on here…..again with the rambunctious, snappy drums driving the song along in impeccable fashion.
The sweetly understated closer, Underneath The Sky, which perfectly signs off the album on a more winsome note, once more revisits the dreamy tunesmithery of Harvey Williams’ Another Sunny Day, which of course is no bad thing at all, given how everything on here is intentionally meant to evoke the very best of all the vintage late 1980s indie pop bands – of which Humdrum are so lovingly and faithfully indebted to and so expertly skilful at recreating here.
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Granted, the songs on Every Heaven may have a ring of overriding familiarity about them (and indeed there are a few moments on some of them where you get that nagging feeling that you’ve come across that melody before) but that’s a minor and rather trivial issue, given that all ten songs are pure shameless indie pop perfection of a kind that has been sadly lacking for too long now. Indeed, sometimes it’s a welcome tonic and a refreshing antidote to much of the everyday sounds that have been assaulting our ears with so much relentlessness.
So who really cares if Every Heaven is unashamedly retrogressive and harking back to a long-gone era in some ways? Certain genres will always remain timeless and ultimately transcend all fads and trends regardless of whether they’re still ‘cool’ or not. On the strength of these sparkling pop confections collected together on this impressive debut, Loren Vanderbilt III certainly knows a thing or two about combining bittersweet sentiments with infectious choruses whilst harbouring a genuine passion for crafting brilliant tunes that proudly have all his musical influences on display.
As he sings so assuredly in Superbloom: ‘In the heavens where you run to / I’ll be running right beside you / Don’t you wanna run away with me too?’. And the answer, on this evidence, would be an emphatic yes.
All words by Martin Gray
More reviews and articles by Martin can be found here
Follow Humdrum on Instagram here
Humdrum – Every Heaven can be purchased here on the Bandcamp page
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