Looking back over the history of popular music it's often the case that the big records come in from the peripheries. While established career bands keep going on momentum, occasionally making a major statement, it's the margins of the mainstream that allow artists to invent and re-invent. If anyone needs an explanation as to how come Echobelly have just made an album as breathtaking as 'Gravity Pulls' they need only look at the circumstances of its creation, away from the treadmills of time and money.
The sound of a classic guitar pop band soaring on freedom 'Gravity Pulls' resonates with spatial and spiritual ambition, while being shot through with melodic pop instincts. Its a UK guitar band album that so transcends its geography and time frame it could have been made in the East or the West, on earth or in space, now or at any time in the past thirty five years. Its feels like out of body music, but its still pop, in the sense that Brian Wilson was doing pop music even at his most untethered.
According to linear chronology 'Gravity Pulls' is the fifth album from London based band Echobelly. In essence however its the second from the re-invented band who escaped from the pressures of major labels, media assumptions and insular scenes just in time for the millennium.
From 1993 through to 1999 the Echobelly trio of Sonya Aurora Madan (vocals) Glenn Johansson (guitar) and Andy Henderson (drums) had proved themselves to be classic pop song writers, with songs that swaggered and seduced as if Blondie had fused with The Smiths, only better. Their debut album, 'Everyone's Got One', went Gold in 94, the follow up, 'On', went Platinum in 95 and in between times they had six top 40 singles and went on three world tours.
At the time, the hit records and front covers looked like an end point achievement in itself. It looked like their identities were set. Sonya and Glenn were classic insider/outsider, yin-yang pop partners. Glenn was a Swedish Anglophile. Sonya was born in India but raised in London with an acute perspective on Brit life. Glenn was the reticent genius guitarist - part Johnny Marr and part The Edge. Sonya was the eminently objectifiable front for the band with the gymnastic voice and feisty opinions. Amongst the UK bands of the time, the Radioheads and Blurs, they were the pushy, vivacious, unpredictable younger siblings. But what becomes glaringly more apparent with each successive song on 'Gravity Pulls' is that those days were really just the apprenticeship.
With the bands third album 'Lustra' in 1997 they reached the end of their ability to function within a mega corporation. As thinking people and as curious musicians they had grown during the 90s, and now they wanted to explore. Pragmatism would have dictated that they continued to make music within the limitations imposed by a big company, but Sonya, Glenn and Andy had concluded that the next phase of their journey would be far more exciting if they went off road.
As the millennium turned, the three Echobelly core members went trekking in the Himalayas. In 2000 they returned to form their own self run label Fry Up and record and release their best album up to that point 'People Are Expensive'. A bewitching album of warm currents and starlit wonder, 'People Are Expensive' was a signpost on the way to 'Gravity Pulls'. The intervening year and half saw the band take their journey inwards, Glenn seeming to step back inside the plangent guitar chords, and Sonya exploring a vast inner space of emotions.
"We found ourselves in a very interesting place as artists where we had no ties and no connections to responsibilities other than to ourselves, and it's great for freeing up the creative process," says Sonya. "With this album we felt that we were at a certain place, we had total freedom to create an album that was very natural to us."
"The recording process was a pretty smooth one," says Glenn "Because we had time to demo the album at home before we went into the studio. The whole thing was recorded in two weeks, it has kind of taken us in a different direction. We wanted to make an album that would draw you into it rather than be straight in your face."
'Gravity Pulls' makes no effort to bowl you over instantly. Instead it unfolds slowly as a sublime panorama. The guitars hang in the air. There is space and stillness. Songs swoop upward dramatically reminding you that the band can rock, and then give way to reflective atmospheres. There are hints of Indian classical music. Acoustic guitars vie with tripped out electronic textures. A simple but beautiful piano ballad pushes up the levels of poignancy. The landscape is all sky and ocean, rainfall and desert.
Making the map up as they go along Echobelly have wandered into a unique new soundworld. There are moments where echoes of something recognizable come through but they evaporate as soon as you try and to hold onto them. Could it be a hint of Ry Cooder, or some future twist on Fleetwood Mac doing 'Albatross'? But then maybe its Mazzy Star on a balloon flight with Shiv Kumar Sharma across the valley of Kashmir.
"With 'Big Sky Mind' I'd been listening to some Indian classical music and I love the mantra like quality, it can just stay on one chord all the time," says Glenn."And then to be creative within that chord, you have to really stretch your melodies and that's what we tried to do with 'Big Sky Mind'. Anyone knowing Sonya via her erstwhile media profile as Anglo-Asian mouthpiece with strong opinions on everything from sex and drugs to dreams and cats will be surprised by the vulnerable, spiritual person they meet through the lyrics of 'Gravity Pulls'. Anyone who could see though her earlier media image will not.
Her voice remains as strong and seductive as before, proving on tracks like 'One In A Million', 'What You Deserve' and 'You Started A Fire In The Heart Of A Wasted Life' that she can turn on pop euphoria effortlessly. But much of the album - within the blue wash of the title track, the lulling strings of 'To Get Me Through The Good Times', the hypnotic incantations of 'Djinn' and 'Big Sky Mind', naked piano ballad 'Strangely Drawn' and the mystical acoustic elegy 'All Tomorrow Brings' - reveals a complex, searching person, unafraid to face dark truths, driven to seek deeper meanings and blessed with a magical ability to turn them into spellbinding songs.
"The title track 'Gravity Pulls' is very much a transportive track for me, "says Sonya. "It's a metaphor really for escape and freedom and a sense of finding out who you are. In the past I've been known as a sort of a semi-political writer and there were a lot of issues that were very close to my heart that I suppose people who've seen us in the past would be aware of. But I think having had the space of a few years to let all that wash away I found myself looking inside connecting to something that is non political, that's universal, that has a form of expression that doesn't ostracize anybody."
As would be the way with a record that was worked on in tranquility for a year there are many dimensions to explore with 'Gravity Pulls'. It might be important to know that 'Big Sky Mind' was written under the influence of beat poets Kerouac and Ginsberg, and that it took shape as a series of freeform haikus. It could matter that 'Djinn' is derived from the Arabic word meaning ghost spirit, and reflects on what might have happened to Sonya had she never left India. But 'Gravity Pulls' is not the kind of record that's going to wear out quickly. Anyone who lives with it for a while will find that it gives up its secrets gradually, but willingly.
There is plenty of time for 'Gravity Pulls'. And there is now plenty of time for Echobelly. In charge of their own destinies and running their own company in line with the zeitgeist, they can be true to themselves. With the experience gained through their past life in the heart of the music machine and the creative freedom they've fought for, they can take whatever shape they want, mess with the clocks and probably defy gravity.
"It might sound a bit weird," reflects Sonya. "But with this album it was almost like being a new band in the sense that when you first start off you're all excited about all these possibilities, we had that luxury... so it was almost like being kids again."
Watch them grow.
