The No Real Need - Nonlocal Motives CD - OTH 7111

The No Real Need can be traced back to when a teenage Steve Hewitt first blasted Guided By Voices' 'Teenage FBI' from the downstairs bedroom of his parents house one morning in 2000. His younger brother Mark was appalled at what he heard. First it had been The Beatles, then R.E.M., and now this—another flimsy second-tier guitar-pop band whose frivolous melodies would follow him around day and night, burrowing into his consciousness permanently like bad television, polluting his puritanical version of Modern Rock—a military state in which Fugazi ruled with an iron fist and the only pop to be heard was the slip of a spinal disc in an all-male mosh pit where no-one was allowed to do the twist. But he couldn't shut out the fun forever. A decade later young Mark found himself—one part D.C. and nine parts Ringwood—in the woods in Ohio where the Pabst flowed like water, belting the drums in the name of his older brother's studio debut. When Leon Cranswick and other brother Adam Hewitt joined a little later, Steve's lo-fi bedroom recording project became a full band.

Nonlocal Motives is The No Real Need's second album, and is the first document of the band as a four-piece. Recorded by Robert Pollard's right-hand man Todd Tobias at Waterloo Sound in the USA, and by Brent Punshon at Melbourne's Head Gap, it has more of a live feel than 2009's Thistles Where We Slept; yet the addition of new voices has only broadened the canvas for Steve's idiosyncratic pop, which reaches a little further out into space this time. The songs project richly imagined, echo-laden nth dimensions, littered with metaphysical musings and Jungian freak-outs. There are more layers, more echo-tinged tangents than before, all coated in a sticky shared DNA damaged as much by grunge as by tape delay. But the essential sound of Steve's operation remains: an odd blend of stiff-armed Colin Newman-style experimentalism and buttery, harmonised pop. Probably closer to the latter, much to the drummer's chagrin. Cassette version available in April on Do Your Block.