It Hugs Back
Inside My Guitar
4AD
Maybe I'm just getting too long in the tooth but I feel like I've been here before. A recession sound-tracked by shoe gazing kids playing fuzzy guitars from behind their fringes. It must be the early 90s again. No its just the debut album of Kent indie foursome It Hugs Back. I don't know for a fact that they have long fringes but I'd bet a fiver in these credit crunch times that they do stare at the floor when playing live. Like I said maybe I'm getting old. To be fair 'Inside Your Guitar' does grow on you with time but then with time hair grows on the back of old men too.
Listening to Inside your Guitar fills me with a sense of turning into one of those 'it wasn't like that in my day' veterans grumpily crossing their arms at the back of a gig I used to mock as a wide-eyed indie 17 year old suffocating against the crash barrier at the front. Dylan summed it up my current dilemma best in my Back Pages with the lament 'fearing that I'd become my enemy in the instance that I preached.' So it is, age catches up with all of us. Melancholic opener Q merely makes me want to patronisingly encourage them to download some early Mogwai to hear just how dark brooding music really can be. 'Back Down' makes me glad that The Jesus and Mary Chain didn't sand paper down their edges. I could go on but then I'd become the enemy preacher.
When It Hugs Back admit to their youth and in throw in a bit of fire and mischief they do show promise and inspire the thought they may be worth persevering with. When they rip up the world weariness that doesn't suit them and plug into the energy of their age Inside Your Guitar has fleeting moments of real joy. 'Work Day' is the sound of escapades on an afternoon bunking college and 'Unaware' is like walking home drunk on a summer's night. They've definitely got potential. I wouldn't be too shocked to discover they release a classic in a few years and look back on Inside Your Guitar slightly embarrassed by just how seriously young men take themselves. Again Dylan's Back Pages springs to mind “ah but i was so much older then I'm younger than that now”. If the boys of It Hugs Back ask the old cynic with arms crossed at the back of their next gig he might just tell them that 'youth is wasted on the young'.
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