Late Starters: Crackle OK

I love an album that takes the listener on a journey, and I’d wager (“cos booze and dice is never dull”) that there are few albums that can catapult us on a more astronomical and fantastical voyage than this one. Crackle OK, released in July 2014, is the first full-length release from Coventry rock outfit Late Starters and was also the inaugural release on the indie record label Creature Lab Records.

Late Starters are a three-piece band with a modal, riff-led, stabbing rhythmic style. The mastery of this album, though, lies in how atmospherically the baroque story songs of the imagination of Late Starters are captured. Characters from the deepest darkest reaches of the imagination jump out of the musical canvas and become larger than life by way of the music’s jagged illustration. Crackle OK covers astronomical distances, from the smoky rooms of local government populated with ministers and sycophants, to the vast reaches of space and time. Each song is brought all the more vividly to life by the entertaining song descriptions that accompany the lyrics posted up on the Late Starters bandcamp page.

Coursing through the veins of Crackle OK is a certain supernatural energy that is channeled down the lightning conductors of Creature Lab and affects its transformative energy upon the album forwards and backwards in time, particularly on A Certain Pedigree, John Hundred, and Fish Tail. The journey begins in all its grim inevitability with Tin Tack in the salty air of a wartime harbour where

“the seagulls that are circling are crying my name

they beg me not to go but I must go just the same”

whilst barnacled heroes await mighty warriors due to rise from the brine.

A seagull’s flight across Crackle OK’s alternate landmass, Hillman House is for me a fine achievement in the communication of a sense of place via the medium of song, expertly capturing the workaday ambience of the Midlands of England at the same time as its grit and magic. Staring out of the windows of “smoky rooms in Hillman House”, we hear the story of protagonist Sheedy, while the music draws the imagination far out into the sprawling suburbs of a “town of mud and rust”.

“and every hanger on knows the words and sings along”

Mauler is a prime example of the balance that this album strikes between angular riffs and hooks, and the joy and energy that Late Starters can generate when they turn a major corner, in the musical sense, like the throwing of a heavy electrical switch. Deliciously disorientating, the intro allows you jump on board at various beats of the bar and kicks off the track cleverly. The rhythm section then cross-talks beautifully throughout this great track. 

“transistors start to pop and sing

the vacuum tubes are screaming”

Perhaps the crowning glory of the album, and certainly the furthest point in its imaginative reach, is Space Opera (Parts 1 and 2). As its name (and Late Starters’ own description) suggests, this is a grand and theatrical tale of interstellar travel that contains all the tragedy and perverse comedy of opera, and is, of course, a song of two halves. Reminiscent in parts of prog rock in the mould of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, it also has an energy that would not be out of the place in the mythical universe of Ulysses 31, the French-Japanese epic space cartoon from the early 1980s that pitted doomed space travellers against the wrath of the ancient gods of Olympus.

“so distant, so cold

when I next breathe I’ll be 10,000 years old”

This comparison can be made not only due to the grand imagery of Space Opera, but also because of the unbeatable riff-driven motifs of the contrasting parts that change gear so beautifully through the eerie reverberating nebula of sounds that connects them (get this on in some big headphones and enjoy!). The song is almost crying out for an animated video and leaves us on a perfectly executed finale.

I thoroughly enjoyed this album and it has been near the top of my listening for 2014 and admittedly, most of 2015. The band have since released a couple of EPs to follow on from this excellent album, and these should hopefully be covered at a later time on Noisy Dirty City. Until then, sit back and listen to Crackle OK and let it transport you on its journey. By the sound of it though, try not to get off the rollercoaster in Chisel Town, and definitely don’t end up on Broken Spear.

"Only the fates could bring me here".