The Late Cord – ‘Lights From the Wheelhouse’ (4AD) Released 24/04/06

This debut mini album is a micro-comet, a beguiling and haunting glow from the dark of a small Texan town. Its two protagonists both have musical day jobs – John-Mark Lapham being responsible for samples as a member of The Earlies and Micah P. Hinson as a singer-songwriter in the vein of Leonard Cohen. As The Late Cord, they appear fully-formed from another world.

Opener ‘Lila Blue’ sets the scene, unfolding over 8 minutes. Emerging from nothing is a synth line pitched somewhere between elegiac and melancholy. As thumb piano adds to the melody an eventual howl of feedback ushers in a buried, stilted industrial motion beat. Hinson vocals are smeared and vague and by now the song has taken on a damaged devotional air, somehow paradoxically reaching towards a state of bliss. Electronic comets spurt and shimmer in the background as an acoustic guitar adds to the texture but none of this dampens the clarity. Suddenly, all the instruments fade and you’re left alone with a warm but brittle electric guitar, the vocals reappear with slightly more definition, Hinson quietly wondering (wandering) “sometimes I think of you/ I wonder if you think of me”. He vanishes again, the synths return and it all comes to a slow climax.

Burning laurels in the dark, ‘The Late Cord’ silently glues Charles Bronson’s Harmonica Man to an impossibly thin electric guitar and wordless humming, gradually gaining reverb and turning into a faded hallucinogenic rite. ‘Chains/ Strings’ drifts by, a poignant swathe of strings paving the way for an eerie collage of bells and children’s voices and electronic effect. Rising out of this is stately piano and we’re into ‘My Most Meaningful Relationships are With Dead People’ which slowly spirals towards an edgy grace and what feels like acceptance of life’s unaccountable moments, those glimpsed furtively or instinctively- some kind of breakthrough. Lapham and Hinson leave us ‘Hung From the Cemetery Gates’ with space crackle, Casio, mandolin and quiet consideration.

This is a genuinely original, half hour of music that exists within a sound world of its own understanding. It is beautiful, haunting and if you give it a chance, will tint your life with a little bit of alien strangeness.