Ooberman

Taking a step back from the fickle clamour for mainstream popularity on an indie scene that for the most part rejected them, Dan Popplewell and his band now inhabit a no-man’s-land between cult of indie and higher art. To be judged on the music alone is all they ask for as they teeter on the edge of existence, financial casualty of major label materialism. In such a climate an artistic mutation has seemed to take place which has given birth to a new kind of creativity in a perfectly organic manner.

The exuberant alt-pop magic of their first album, ‘The Magic Treehouse’ then has almost entirely given way to a less bounded form of expression encroaching upon the genuinely creative, with their recent ‘Running Girl’ mini album leading the way, and a new full length LP voyaging into the depths of the soul following on. Songs like the rabble-rousing ‘Sur La Plage’ and ‘Blossoms Falling’ stand on their own tonight as near perfect, wonderful adrenaline-fuelled alt-youth anthems and are received rapturously by the cluster at the front of the Barfly, but it is the expanded vision of the new that beguiles the Oober-layman.

The more reflective and humbly poetic grace of efforts like ‘Shorley Wall’ and ‘Roll me in Cotton’ lead the way magically into new territory. Efforts like the mystically intricate ‘Where Did I Go Wrong?’ and ‘Dreams in the Air’ are strikingly beautiful, performed to serene and hypnotising effect by Popplewell and the vocally sensuous Sophia Churney, who’s voice seems to be at the forefront of the new sound. ‘Hand That Gets Burnt’ is a melancholically triumphant hymn to defiance that scales the true heights of musical artistry and feeling, Sophia’s voice riding the guitars like a wave to the distances of the chorus, and is representative of a number of other intricate nuggets which hit similar emotional buttons. Cited on the sleeve of the new album is the influence of Western Journeyer to the East Hermann Hesse and Armenian composer Aram Kachaturian, and another pronounced development for the band is again what seems like a natural progression into Eastern imagery. In ‘SnakeDance’, the performance is taken up a theatrical notch as Popplewell wields a violin like Heifetz, and wrings out of it a sensitively riotous tune that poeticises a lifetime of rebellion. ‘Summer Nights in June’ is another exotically evoked Eastern hymn that captures all the spirit of the ancients, managing to avoid any pretence in a sheer exultant glow.

It has never been more called for that a true artist discovers a music of the soul and comes to “re-claim” the kids. In Ooberman, a movement of fragile beauty once more drifts in the barren waters of mainstream alternative music. The poetically inclined won’t fail to be enticed.