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Artist News CMU Approved Releases
Approved: Cassels
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 27 January 2022
While their approach to songwriting in the past has always been to do it at speed, during the pandemic brothers Jim and Loz Beck – aka Cassels – took the time to finesse their work a bit more.
And so, next week they return with their third album ‘A Gut Feeling’ – their first since 2019 – which loses none of the raw energy of previous releases but takes them deeper into their raw, riff-heavy sound. On top, Jim’s spoken word lyrics shift from introspective to “an intentionally muddy mix of experience, opinion, red herrings and fiction”.
“I found that setting myself the brief of writing character pieces offered a nice way of sneaking quite personal things into the songs without being explicitly autobiographical”, he explains.
Two singles, ‘Mr Henderson Coughs’ and ‘Charlie Goes Skiing’, came out last year, instantly marking a new peak in the band’s creative output. Heavier, more layered and with sharper bite, the music here suggests that the duo have really found out who they are through making this record.
Further confirmation of this comes with new single ‘Beth’s Recurring Dream’, which they describe as “pretty much a straightforward, 4/4, garage rock banger”.
“Hope can be both a tonic and an affliction”, they go on. “It can help make a bad situation bearable, but at the same time can also keep you trapped in that same bad situation. That’s what this song is about, amongst other things”.
With the album out on 4 Feb, the band kick of a UK tour next week too, starting at Elsewhere in Margate on 3 Feb and concluding at The Victoria in London on 19 Feb.
Listen to ‘Beth’s Recurring Dream’ here:
