It’s possible the news passed you by, but a prog band won the Mercury Prize last year. It’s possible you caught their twee, unambitious, nothing-to-see-here band name (see also: Dry Cleaning, Wet Leg, etc) and decided not to explore further.
It’s possible you thought they were part of that ever-growing, NME-friendly, modern English post-punk glut (see also: Dry Cleaning, Wet Leg etc) and dismissed them as cookie-cutter. It’s possible you weren’t really paying attention.
But English Teacher – whose debut album This Could Be Texas walked away with the Mercury award – are about as progressive as it gets.
Anyone unconvinced is advised to ease their way in with track nine. Nearly Daffodils comes together quickly, kicking off like a Disney version of Neu!, with Nicholas Eden’s bass racing jauntily beneath singer Lily Fontaine’s breathless, half-sung, half-spoken vocals.
By the 10-second mark, the song is already doing the unexpected, with a sudden blast of discordant, cusp-of-collapse guitar hoving into view before vanishing just as quickly. The song continues in this vein, with clever flurries of musical activity keeping multiple balls in the air. And then, at 1:50, it all goes, against expectations, a bit King Crimson.
“The middle section of Nearly Daffodils is heavily inspired by the end section of Frame By Frame [from King Crimson’s 1981 album Discipline],” Eden told Brooklyn Vegan last year. “Robert Fripp’s guitar parts make me rewind nearly every time I listen to this track.
“Adrian Belew and Fripp’s 7/8 guitars interweave (somehow), finding each other and completing with a flurry of notes from a third guitar at the very end. Yummy.”
In the same interview, English Teacher namechecked other songs that fed into the creation of This Could Be Texas, among them Radiohead’s discombobulating weepy True Love Waits, the propulsive space rock of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s Rattlesnake and David Bowie’s melodramatic Five Years.
They careen wildly from one idea to the next, toying with mood and time signature without losing sight of beautifully crafted pop melodies
They sound like a band who didn’t plot their sound before plugging in. Instead, they sound like the happiest of accidents, where notions of genre weren’t so much put carefully aside as deemed irrelevant from the off, where great taste begat great results.
There’s an enticing freedom to their music, with songs – such glorious, memorable songs! – that careen wildly from one idea to the next, giddily toying with mood and time signature without ever losing sight of some beautifully crafted pop melodies.
And they have the chops to pull it off. It should be noted that the band met while studying at Leeds Conservatoire, where alumni include Asia/Yes man Geoff Downes and a plethora of notable jazzers.
All of which boils down to something inescapable: English Teacher are a phenomenal band, and This Could Be Texas is a phenomenal album. Do yourself a favour and give it a listen.
