B-Side Guys

The song started at a soundcheck in Brest, a port town on the westernmost tip of France, which is either a cliché or the most MEMORIALS origin story possible, depending on how you feel about a duo that tours with a reel-to-reel tape machine and loops themselves into the equivalent of a five-piece band. Matthew Simms, guitarist for Wire and It Hugs Back, and Verity Susman, frontwoman of Electrelane, have been quietly building one of the more interesting catalogs in British indie, and “Wildly Remote” is them at their most deceptively simple.

The track is a folk song that holds itself together through restraint until the middle, when a saxophone tape-loop solo arrives in the space where a conventional instrumental break would sit. The Leslie speaker blurring the electric guitar’s edges, the warm upfront production, the same three-chord sequence running under both verse and chorus: all of it is setup for that moment of deliberate wrongness that turns out to be exactly right. Simms describes it as an unconventional sound in a conventional spot, which undersells how disorienting it is in the best possible way.

The chorus wordplay he mentions, expressing something true but not quite realized or out of reach, is the kind of lyrical quality that rewards paying attention without punishing you for not. The intimacy is real. The deceptive simplicity is also real. Those two things aren’t in tension so much as in conversation, which is the same balance MEMORIALS have been striking since Memorial Waterslides and across supports for Stereolab on their U.S. tour.

All Cloud Bring Not Rain arrives March 27 on Fire Records, and if this single is any indication, the tape machine gets more time to shine.