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8:49 · 1,473 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The channel itself traces back to this record. Hearing Breezeblocks in 2012 sent the host from straightforward indie pop into the kind of listening that became Middle 8.
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- An Awesome Wave was built as a full album experience, nearly half of it released as singles, with some non-singles becoming more popular than the singles.
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- The interludes are explicitly labelled rather than just functioning as interludes, which signals that the record is meant to be heard whole.
▶ 00:01:21
- There is a hidden track after five minutes of silence, the sort of thing you only find by leaving the CD running.
▶ 00:01:40
- The sound sits between folk and trip hop, and the detail most listeners miss is that there are no cymbals anywhere on the record, because the drummer wrote the parts on pots and pans.
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- Joe Newman's delivery works as an instrument but buries the words, which matters because the songs are built from unusually specific sources.
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- Those sources are literary and cinematic: a standoff from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the climax of Leon, a scene from Last Exit to Brooklyn, and a phrase from Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho that supplies the album title.
▶ 00:03:05
- They won the Mercury Prize, and then guitarist and bassist Gwil Sainsbury left months before the second album, put off by the industry and the touring life.
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- Relaxer is defended as underrated, with the argument that the sleepy House of the Rising Sun cover and one overbearing snare sound colour the reception of an eight-track album.
▶ 00:05:53
- The verdict is that the band were expected to become one of the decade's biggest and underwhelmed at each turn, and the Radiohead comparison stuck mostly because the debut felt undefinable.
▶ 00:07:40