Sea monsters, swirling organs, and Chatham pockets

Our music correspondent Stephen Morris reviews three new Medway records by the Penrose Web, the Spike Direction Effect, and the Guy Hamper Trio

There’s a lot of new Medway music emerging at the moment, so we got our music correspondent, Stephen Morris, to take a listen to three new releases from Medway bands and tell you all about them.

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The Least of Our Concerns by The Penrose Web

An idea for an art gallery to pick up: an exhibition of Medway-based album covers all blown up to metre-square images. Theatre Royal’s …And Then It Came Out of My Head, Stuart Turner and the Flat Earth Society’s Scowl, The Singing Loins’ 13 Moon Songs from Merry Hell. Each one is a stunning piece of art in its own right.

And now, of course, there is The Least of our Concerns by The Penrose Web. The artwork is an exquisite sketch of a seaside pier, complete with a helter-skelter and pavilion. But between these two structures, hiding in plain sight, is an optical illusion: an impossible triangle. Or, to give it its proper name: the Penrose triangle.

There’s also a rather ominous sight: the tail of some curious, and worryingly enormous sea creature.

It’s an entirely fitting image to accompany the songs found on The Least of our Concern – and not just because the band shares its name with the shape at the centre of the image. Like the seaside drawing adorning the cover, the music seems, on first listen, relatively innocuous. This is, after all, the sound of The Prisoners/The Galileo 7’s Allan Crockford and Thrashing Doves/Death in Vegas’s Ian Button having a bit of knock-about fun with some psych-pop tunes.

Only it’s not quite that simple.

At the heart of the album stands the aural equivalent of an impossible triangle – with the menace of a sea monster always lurking in the background. This is a record about wars within one’s own mind, of regrets over the past and frustration with the slipping away of time, of a desire to become better while the world gets worse.

The record opens with a deceptive, light of touch sounding tune full of whimsy and word play (“it’s never too late to be out of date”). But amidst all of this, ‘Never Too Soon,’ with its jangly light psychedelic sound, sets the scene for much of what is to follow. This is a song, just like the album it introduces, that is all about an unwinnable battle with time. Nowhere do Crockford and Button put it better than on the line “it’s autumn but it feels just like spring.”